


Sight

by AntiKryptonite



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Relationship Study, Through the seasons, because that's what I do, character introspection, obviously Rumbelle is endgame, or at least through the seasons I like which are 1-3a, the GoldenHeart is there just because it's in the show
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24578023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntiKryptonite/pseuds/AntiKryptonite
Summary: With the gift of Sight, Rumplestiltskin is overwhelmed by a thousand, thousand possibilities unspooling all around him. He sees Bae as a child, as a man, laughing, hurting, hating, forgiving. He sees Belle, come back to him, dead in his arms, choosing him, reviling him. So many possibilities, but perhaps the most unlikely one of all is this: that they both choose to see him in return. Him as he really is...and still they love him.
Relationships: Baelfire | Neal Cassidy & Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Evil Queen | Regina Mills & Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Prince Charming | David Nolan & Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Queen of Hearts | Cora/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	1. The Deal-Maker

**Author's Note:**

> Another OUaT story? Yes, I apparently like writing for defunct fandoms, so here we are. This one has been in the planning for years and years but only been in the writing for a month or two so hopefully that doesn't show too much. 
> 
> Also, as a personal disclaimer that applies to every OUaT story I have ever and will ever write: I choose to ignore the fact that this show went on for however many seasons it did and willfully reject anything as canon after 3x11, so nothing here will be canon-compliant for anything after that. I'm sorry if that bothers you, but I choose to enjoy what parts of the show I love and not complicate my life (or my blood pressure) by trying to figure out what happened after I stopped watching. Thanks for understanding and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Disclaimer: Most Rumplestiltskin parts from the show are here in some form or another, and some dialogue is taken directly from episodes that were written by others. No copyright infringement is intended, just admiration and enjoyment.

It all started when he took the gift of foresight from the lying seer. Or that’s what he tells himself anyway (he has grown quite adept at lying to himself; just another habit picked up from the Dark One). It’s only after he clasps those hands, feels the far-seeing eyes squirming against his palms, is overwhelmed by a thousand, _thousand_ possibilities opening up before him, that Rumplestiltskin begins to see _him_.

Baelfire. Bae. His beautiful, brave, bold boy, out there somewhere all alone, a world removed from his father (so familiar, this tale, that it brings bile to his throat), waiting for Rumplestiltskin to find him.

And he will. Of course he will. He is immortal now, all of time mere threads to spin beneath his hands, all of magic his to claim and employ and wield. He has the inadvertent promise of the Blue Fairy and now the gift of prophecy to assure him that somewhere, somewhen, his Bae will be returned to the circle of Rumplestiltskin’s once-feeble, now-powerful arms.

He _will_ see his boy again, and until that day comes, he can be patient. He can subsist on memories (well-loved, well-worn, but still so much more vibrant than his lonely present), can bide his time and imagine the lives around him as strings to be plucked and played and propelled in certain directions.

And once he leaves the seer’s body cooling on the forest floor (too little, too merciful a punishment for the one who brought down every bad thing in Bae’s life, but such is life: the wicked thrive and the innocent suffer), he sees in his own mind that moment she promised him. One day, in another world, centuries from now, there will be a reunion. 

It’s just a glimpse, but it’s enough.

Enough to comfort him. Enough to lull him. Enough to drive him mad.

Because that’s when it begins. The visions that aren’t visions. The sight that isn’t Sight. The glimpses that lie and mislead and deceive—but oh, what beautiful, enchanting deceptions.

The first time he sees it ( _him_ ), Bae’s running ahead down the path as he kicks his ball (the one Rumplestiltskin handmade for the youngster and has carefully preserved along with all the rest of Baelfire’s belongings, magic once more saving Bae for him) with agile feet and a child’s energy. At first, Rumplestiltskin thinks he must have imagined the similarities, seeing the familiar in the stranger. But no, he knows that silhouette, the fall of hair over that brow, the shape of his form and the lines of his profile. 

Perhaps, then, he is dreaming. Sleep is elusive in this new form of his and ever more so since that green cyclone (yet again) devoured the person he loves most in all the realms (and that, _that_ , he wishes Bae could have understood, is the true curse). So perhaps he’s simply nodded off, slipped into sleep without noticing and now dreams of days when the world was his, all wrapped up in dark hair and trusting eyes and a solid form that offered him unwavering support.

But magic curls, panting and eager, around his wrists, ready to be unleashed. And there are others around him, watching him, staring at the Dark One in their presence, keeping their distance while they watch (and _wish_ , he knows, wish that his power was theirs to do with as they will). So he’s awake. Awake, and yet that is his boy laughing as the ball nearly gets away from him.

It must, then, he thinks with dawning hope, be his foresight. A gift of the future delivered to him so unexpectedly. So graciously. 

Rumplestiltskin takes his first full breath in months at the thought that this moment (this Bae of easy laughter and nimble feet) will be his again.

(There is a reason he has learned how to lie in the recesses of his mind, in the hollows of his echoing heart: it gives him reason to keep breathing when nothing else does.)

Breathing deeply, he (almost) doesn’t mind when the vision of Bae disappears behind the clatter of an approaching wagon. It’s a near thing, but he manages not to vaporize the wagon and donkey and driver altogether in retaliation. He thinks Bae would have been proud of that restraint (and he will be, one day in another world, when Rumplestiltskin has collected enough power to protect them but is separated from the curse his beautiful boy couldn’t see past).

It’s a reward, this brief sight (and if it seems strange, well, that is only because he is not used to receiving anything but pain and loss), a reminder to stay the course, to ignore the pain of magic’s price and the loneliness of his cursed life. A gift beyond measure, and like the greedy beggar (the penniless coward) he is, he clutches it close and hoards it for the long years ahead.

\---

It is not the last time he catches sight of his boy, and Rumplestiltskin begins to live for those brief glimpses. For the flicker of Bae’s dark hair flopping just at the edges of his vision, the distant sound of his voice ( _Papa!_ in a childish squeal; _Papa!_ with that sound of accusation that everyone else had already long since learned to throw his way, and oh, words and names and nuances matter more than he could have possibly comprehended before power and pain). 

Some days, he sees Bae following in his wake, quiet but present. Other days, he chatters long words of gibberish like he did as a toddler, always so willing to cling close to Rumplestiltskin, never far from his side. Most often, he is removed from Rumplestiltskin by a distance he can’t quite bring himself to broach—but sometimes, oh, sometimes he is so near that Rumplestiltskin could reach out and touch him (if he were only brave enough). And one day, one day he _is_ brave (or just desperate, because that’s what he is, his faults branded into a dagger and marked over all his flesh, his desperate soul cloaking him from the outside in). One day, Bae reaches out for Rumplestiltskin’s hand, the way he once did so openly, so trustingly—and yearningly, foolishly ( _desperately_ ), Rumplestiltskin lets him.

Bae vanishes.

There one instant, gone the next. Ripped from him _again_. A transition so abrupt, so damning, that Rumplestiltskin goes mad.

His son! His beautiful boy who would rest his heavy head against Rumplestiltskin’s shoulder. The hand that used to slide so easily into his, then learned to curl around his papa’s elbow to help him stand upright (wrong, so wrong, for his perfect son to have to support him, but Rumplestiltskin longs for it anyway because he is weak and selfish and not nearly as patient as he tries to pretend). All of it gone once more, leaving him alone and abandoned and solitary, not a papa, not a spinner, nothing but a monster.

When the smoke clears (when his sanity is yanked back into place through sheer force of will and Bae’s name scrawled like fire through his veins), Rumplestiltskin finds himself standing in a crater a thousand feet wide. Mountains surround him where once there were flatlands, land crumpled upward and straining for escape from the magic still seething inside him.

Devastation on every side. 

He thinks he should care whether there were towns, villages, people nearby, but he doesn’t. He can’t. None of them were Bae, and none of them would help him reunite with his son and he will outlive them all anyway, still hurting and waiting and manipulating long after they are all dust, so why bother himself with details (those tiny, oh-so-important details, the strands of lives that spool out possible futures, so many of them burnt to nothing now).

It’s the crater that bothers him. A hole engulfing him. Locking him out. Reminding him that he is all alone, the only creature left with heart still beating to live out his worst nightmare. A pale mimicry of that smaller crater that stood as his son’s… _no!_ Not a grave, never a grave, just the mark of Rumplestiltskin’s greatest mistake.

In a brilliant flash (not green, though, any color but green; gold and blue and scarlet, amber and carnelian and obsidian, but never again that cyclonic emerald), he fills the crater in, transforms it into a foundation (the same way two craters before have become the foundation of who he is) and then covers it with stone and brick, with doors and gates (not too many of those) and windows (all covered to mask his shame) and heavy ramparts.

A castle for the Dark One. Suitable and fitting. Long overdue, he tells himself, since he’s long outgrown the little cottage where Bae was born (it hurts too much to visit it now anyway). He needs a place where desperate souls can come find him, far away from a spinner’s humble hut and the lore of a magical dagger. 

Rumplestiltskin tells himself he has many reasons for this new fortress, but really, the madness is too close and he needs a safe backdrop. A place where he will not go mad again should the visions of Bae return to him.

\---

They do return. Bae plays in the great hall while Rumplestiltskin spins. He hums that off-tune melody while Rumplestiltskin accumulates and reads book after book after book (and who would have known that the greatest skill the spinner could own was not that of thread and wool and weft, but that of literacy?). He leans his head against Rumplestiltskin’s shoulder, a ghostly weight, while Rumplestiltskin finds exhaustion pulling him down into sleep.

One day, he thinks, this will be his again. He has the Sight to prove it: a single glimpse of another world with his boy in it. 

A promise gifted him by the dying seer and a curse confirmed by an angry fairy. So little, really, to plan his next few centuries around, but the visions of Bae remind him that everything, _anything_ , is worth his precious boy. 

So he learns. He has a castle now, and a reputation, and sheer power, but now he needs cunning and craftiness, a name that will spread and do half his work for him, lore that will armor him in confidence, masks that will fit every occasion, potions to ease the burden of magic’s price, talismans and artifacts and magical antiques to fit any and every occasion (every obstacle) that might arise between him and his boy.

Rumplestiltskin was a name bestowed on him as a curse, and now he makes it one. No need the legends and whispers of a coward who took a magical blade for his son; now he needs a new legend. Dark whispers to match the Dark One’s prestige. Thread by thread, piece by piece, life by life, Rumplestiltskin crafts a new story.

The Dark One who constantly makes deals. The Dark One who never lies but always wins. The Dark One who has no weaknesses save his penchant for crafting deals for desperate souls, who knows everything (or at least knows how to appear as though he does), who cares for nothing and no one (and so cannot be controlled or made to bow and kiss any more boots). For bullies, he remembers the whine of the spinner and the snicker of the men who ambushed him on his way home from the market in Longborne, the taunts of Hordor and the unconcern of all passersby. For the cautious, he channels the scorn of Milah and the ease of Jones. For the unknowing, the unwarned, he becomes the confidante, the learned scholar seeking to educate and refine.

There is a mask for every occasion, a spell for every desire, a solution for every problem—for a price, naturally. 

(He paid the ultimate price for his wish to be granted, so why should they be any different?)

Deception is in his blood, after all. He can still remember Malcolm conning and conniving, manipulating and dreaming, shifting personalities as easily as he eventually shifted forms. He should have known he would end up here, in the end (a coward like his father, a failure like his rootless mother), playing parts and lying by omission, by appearance, by accent and choice of word. 

Rumplestiltskin never thought of himself as smart, so the Dark One becomes the most cunning of individuals with a magical library that rivals any ever before compiled. Rumplestiltskin was weak, so the Dark One is strong, so strong that it is nothing to him, his power almost of no consequence. Rumplestiltskin was poor, penniless, helpless and frightened, so the Dark One is powerful and wealthy and influential and so infamous that even the whisper of his name is enough to raze towns to the ground and spill blood like rain and set even stone to flame.

Rumplestiltskin broke the only deal that ever mattered, so the Dark One never, _never_ breaks deals (and no one breaks deals with him because, one day, they will all lead him like steppingstones to that moment where Bae is within arm’s reach).

And still, none of it matters.

Still, when he returns to the Dark Castle, he is alone. The place echoes. It is haunted by the ghost of what has never been and what won’t be for long centuries more. 

Still, the only comfort, the only consolation, Rumplestiltskin receives are the glimpses of his boy, a phantom just at the corners of his vision.

For now, it’s enough (so long as he never, never reaches out to touch).

\---

It’s been decades since he last heard any whispers about a magical knife, and decades longer since anyone has known to speak of a spinner or a son or a quest. For all intents and purposes, Rumplestiltskin has become nothing more than a myth to add to their world’s lore. 

Perfect, he thinks. It means that those who call him offer deals with no thought to what he might want from whatever it is he asks of them. It means that there’s no one (aside from the meddling fairy, who’s gone peculiarly quiet) to start a list of his deals and his prices, his moves and his interests, to try to puzzle them out. 

He makes deals because it is simply what he does. He requires things of them because he is evil and twisted and wishes only to cause chaos and confusion and harm. 

It’s exactly what he wanted, and when he’s alone, he capers to the knowledge that his plan is succeeding so wonderfully (it’s strange to find success when for his whole life, failure has dogged his every step). 

So why is he bothered, when he walks into a town, and sees all the children swept away? Why does it matter that he never sees anyone younger than two or three decades? What matter that they shelter their children from the man who led a thousand children home from a battlefield they never should have seen in the first place?

It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. None of those children are Bae anyway, so why should he care about them?

(He failed his own child, his flesh and blood, his _everything_ , so why risk touching any other child’s life?)

Just once, though, he longs to reach out and clasp a child’s shoulder. Just to remember what it feels like. To test that he has not forgotten the feel of Bae’s shoulder under his hand, warm and steady and fragile and trusting. Just once. One moment of touch, one instant to remember what it is to be loved unconditionally (except there was a condition, wasn’t there, a caveat he failed when he let go of a hand that only tightened). 

No matter. 

Whatever child he touched, whatever shoulder he clasped…it wouldn’t be Bae’s. It’d be a fake, a lie, a _betrayal_.

Better to remain alone. Better to sneer at the children before they’re snatched away and to smirk at the parents to remind them he allows the pretense that they could save their children (parents never save their children, he knows, not really; they only try and fail).

Better to return to his solitary castle and sit at his spinning wheel and wait (breathlessly, hopelessly) for the image of Bae to appear there.

To make him strong and real and patient once again.

(And always, always, _always_ , just out of reach.)

\---

Exhaustion is his constant companion, as close as the memory of Bae. It follows in his wake waiting to devour him. Rumplestiltskin gives in only occasionally and usually resentfully. It will be centuries more before he is reunited with his son, but still he feels as if there’s not enough time for him to accomplish everything he needs to. 

Curses are still beyond him—casting them is simple, but creating them is another thing entirely. He’s only memorized potions thus far and is still learning how to mix his own recipes. There is still magic beyond him and magic-users who might challenge him. There are other ways to get to other worlds, and he’s so far managed to run down only a few of them (all of them useless to make it to a world lacking magic; if ever he could blame his boy for anything, it would be to ask _why_ he chose the hardest world of all to flee to); there are more out there to discover (the future can be interpreted in many ways, he knows that better than anyone, and who is to say that image he has of a reunion is not just _another_ reunion, a homecoming, a visit after they’ve been together for decades thanks to something besides a world-destroying curse?). All avenues must be explored, everything learned, every book read, every magic-user questioned or defeated or controlled or discarded.

Besides…it is when he is most exhausted, when he’s used so much magic, expended so much focus, when sleep has been weeks in the coming…that’s when he sees Bae most clearly.

His boy, so beautiful, so _young_ , kneeling beside his table filled with simmering potions and smoking ingredients and worn books. Looking up with eyes that shine with inner light, a hand hovering a hair’s breadth over Rumplestiltskin’s shoulder. So _close_. So _clear_. So _forgiving_.

Weariness makes the room spin and ingredients roll away from his hands, but Bae is there, every detail refreshed in his mind, every memory brought back to the forefront.

His boy. 

Not a delusion. No, never that. 

“Don’t forget who you are, Papa,” Bae pleads with him.

“I’ll never forget you, son,” he promises. His hands _burn_ with wanting to touch, but slow as he is, he’s learned this lesson. “Everything I do is for you.”

“I know.” Bae’s head tilts, leans, and Rumplestiltskin is breathless with hope that he will lean against his knee, that he will feel warmth and a beating heart and frail shoulders capable of bearing such burdens (a crippled father, a terrible mother, a reputation he never deserved but was born into; a monster who thought he could protect him and instead broke every promise he made to his son). “I know you, Papa.”

“Bae…” Rumplestiltskin’s lungs turn inside out as he bites back words (arguments; _truth_ , because Bae never knew him, not really, not the coward and the cripple, not until they hung over a place of nightmares and Rumplestiltskin made, as he always does, the wrong choice). 

“I knew it was you the first time you came out of the woods with the dagger, do you remember, Papa?”

“I remember.”

“You scared me.”

“I didn’t mean to. I just…I couldn’t lose you.”

“You loved the power.”

Rumplestiltskin flinches away. “It was the first time I could protect you.”

“And you did,” Bae says, so gentle, so soft, his mouth curving into his crooked smile. Rumplestiltskin has to use magic to immobilize his hands so he doesn’t reach out to touch that smile, to pull his boy close and embrace him so tightly that smile is branded into his skin. “You did protect me. And then you let me go.”

There are no words. No argument. No defense. He did. He _did_ let go. The moment it mattered most, the instant he could have redeemed every mistake, every failure, instead he compounded them all from failings into a crime so big it will take the sacrifice of a world to atone for it.

“Papa,” Bae whispers, and Rumplestiltskin wants to weep (his tears are fire in his blood, coals in his stomach, lightning in his fingertips, a storm building and building and building but never unleashed, not yet, not yet, patience, patience, wait, wait). “I just want my father back. That’s all I ever wanted: my father. Can’t you understand that?”

“I’m coming, Bae,” Rumplestiltskin says (ignores the question because Baelfire doesn’t need to know what worse legacy he has in his family’s past). “I’ll find you, I promise.”

And Bae nods. Believing. Patient. Wary but still giving him the benefit of the doubt, and Rumplestiltskin turns from ideas of bed to mix up yet more potions, read more books, hunt down more magic-users to question.

These glimpses are a _reward_. For his focus, for his patience, for his dedication. These glimpses are the tokens reminding him that he is on the right path, he’s doing the right thing (he will never be like his own father, forgetting the son he abandoned). 

These glimpses are what he lives for.

What use _sleep_ when the alternative is Baelfire?

(What use living _now_ when he lives, instead, for the future?)

\---

Cora changes everything. His Sight has shown her to him for hundreds of years. He’s lost count of how many times he’s raged and slipped into madness waiting for this one auburn-haired beauty to be born, and then how slowly the decades dragged until this moment: her locked in a tower with a pile of straw and a spinning wheel. 

“Who are you?” he asks, because for all that he has seen her (haughty and proud and unbowed; humiliated and shamed and undaunted; in his arms and under him and over him and all around him, a vision he has doubted and scorned and longed for in equal measure), he’s never heard her name.

“Cora,” she says, and he’s not sure why it disappoints him, but it does. 

(Maybe it’s because Bae shakes his head and disappears from the tower.)

“Sounds like something breaking,” he decides, and wonders if it’s his patience. His long, _long_ years of waiting and learning and playing parts. 

Cora is just another pawn. Or so he tells himself. But she asked him _Who are you?_

_Who_. Who, when for so long everyone has asked _what_. When he draws near, she doesn’t flinch. When he calls up magic, she draws nearer. When he bends his head so close to soft, clean skin, she melts back against him.

This is dangerous. Oh, so dangerous. He’s Seen them together, but how well he knows that the future can change, and more importantly than the glimpses of pleasure, he’s Seen this woman’s child. 

A girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a heart that can be made dark enough to cast a Dark Curse.

He can’t mess that up. He can’t risk Bae.

So he pushes. Runs his dry lips over her throat, wraps his clawed hands around her ribcage, and unleashes the Dark One.

“Magic is about emotion,” he lectures (he’s been taught by so many magic-users, and taught so many in his turn that the cloak of educator slips on warm and familiar and easy). “Summon up that moment that made you so angry, you would have killed if you could.”

“What’s your moment?” she asks. 

It’s been so long since anyone has asked about _him_. How long? Maybe his entire life. Maybe this is the very first time anyone besides his boy has ever cared about him. (But he’s not that spinner, that lame husband, that invisible coward anymore; now he’s twisted and broken and flawed and everything this young girl would never want.)

“Once,” he whispers (to Cora, to her unborn, unconceived daughter, to the image of Bae flickering just behind him), “a man made me kiss his boots in front of my son. Now, in my mind, I go back and I rip out his throat, and I crunch his veins with my teeth. And that, dearie, is how magic is made.”

Later, he will think back on this moment and wonder what magic compelled him to spill his secrets and his vulnerabilities and his past at her feet like rusty offerings. Later, he will shiver to know that he spoke aloud of his son to someone else, that he tried to conjure up another, closer, more solid vision of Bae with this flesh and blood woman at his side.

Later. At the moment, all he thinks of is how _close_ he is to a world without magic. How warm Cora is and how rather than drawing from him in fear or disgust, she melts deeper into him as they speak of bloodlust and darkness (everything Bae would have frowned upon and ran away from). At the moment, he is enspelled by possibilities. By Sight come true (and if this one, as unbelievable and unlikely as it always seemed, can be true, then so can that other vision: that one singular vision promising him a reunion with his son). By warmth and round curves and softness that doesn’t gasp in horror or scream in fright.

She read his contract, she speaks of vengeance and power and ruthlessness, and in her is everything he’s ever seen in himself: trod underfoot of the unworthy, the powerful, but willing to stand and overturn and conquer. Not for a child, no, she signed the contract, after all; but for herself, and maybe he should sneer at that, but instead he admires her. Respects her for knowing what she deserves and for not accepting any less (it’s a lesson he would have done well to learn well before a beggar whispered desperate tales into his ear). 

Entire bloodlines have been erased, others created, to ensure that Xavier and Eva and Henry and especially Cora are all here to play their parts. Seeing it play out before him sends a thrill through Rumplestiltskin’s soul. For seemingly an eternity, he has been operating on mere hope (on sheer desperation), on blind faith (on unrelenting insanity). Now, finally, it’s all here. All happening around him, and he is mere decades away from his son. 

_Bae_. His boy. 

It’s the day before Cora’s wedding (a mere two years before his caster’s birth) that it really hits him.

He’s going to see Bae again.

Bae will see _him_ again.

He knows there’s no magic in this other world (of course he knows, it’s what’s caused every obstacle since the Blue Fairy stuck her insect wings where they didn’t belong), but now he actually thinks on that. 

No magic. No power. No influence. No reputation or name to inspire fear. 

Nothing but the lame coward. The spinner who starved. The soldier who ran. The father who let go.

Bae will see him. His boy’s brilliant eyes will look at him, free of scales or magic, and he will see…

What?

( _What_. Of course. _What_ , not _who_.)

He’ll see a man alone. A man with blood on his hands thickened over centuries and a heart blackened by every path he’s gone down in an effort to get what he wants. Bae will see everything he ran from and everything he wanted to change and everything he couldn’t love.

(He’ll look at Rumplestiltskin and see Malcolm.)

Cora stands before a mirror dressed all in white. Beautiful. Brilliant. _Pure_ in a way he never will be (but dark, too, dark enough to look at him and…and… _care_ for him).

“I thought I wanted this,” she says, and the Sight of a caster for his curse wavers and grows dim. “White and bright, all the admiration. But then I look at it. Fifth in line to be Queen. That won’t happen without an awful lot of bloodshed. And what you give me…”

All the training he’s given her, the _bloodlust_ they’ve sought together, the ways he’s become everything he ever despised for her (cheater and cuckold, _pirate_ ), but still she looks at him with wide, dark eyes and takes his hands without hesitating.

But. 

( _Baelfire_.)

“I can give you nothing but darkness and isolation,” he says. 

Is that all he can give his boy too? Will that be all that’s left of Bae’s papa by the time he makes it through realms and curses and sacrifices? 

(Will Bae even love him anymore?)

“And love,” Cora says.

Sight falls away. 

She’s so close. So near. So warm. So brilliant and ruthless and bright and dark and everything he’s never had before (everything a spinner never would have even been able to look at).

(But he’s not that spinner anymore.) 

“Yeah,” he breathes. “And love.”

Her breath is hot against his cheek. Her eyes are big and deep enough to fall into. 

“I want that,” she says. Forthright and honest and blunt and willing to fight for what she wants.

And this, this is more than he deserves. More than he’s ever thought could be his.

There are, he thinks, many types of insanity, and he’s grown so used to fighting off the effects of his darkness that he forgot the more common types of madness (he’s forgotten just how easily it is to delude the desperate; how simple it is to promise everything to someone who knows better but who wants it too badly to care).

So he does what he’s never done before: he alters their deal. 

_Their_ child.

_His_ child.

A dark-haired, dark-eyed child still in the future, and he’ll love her. He’ll love her and protect her from the harshness of the world no matter what it takes. He’ll raise her on stories of her brother, trapped in a world, waiting for rescue. He’ll tell her she’s their savior, that she must one day cast a curse to take them to the one place their family can be complete. She will grow up a hero (how could she not, with Cora’s strength and Bae’s bravery?) and she will cast his Curse—he’ll rewrite it, he’ll spend every waking moment, every night he could be sleeping, revising it and changing that final ingredient. 

(The deal-maker, he’s called, who never lies, who crafts every word so carefully, who chooses each sentence for a purpose. 

Lies. All of it lies.)

“And that is why I love you,” he says. It’s a relief to finally give into this hope. To stop hiding what he wants. To let himself reach out for this future he never thought could be his.

Cora. Dark enough to tear out hearts, bright enough to expand his world—and another child. A girl. A daughter to hold and cherish and teach (a child who will not flinch from his darkness but understand his reasons for it).

(And if he reunites with Bae with a family at his side, won’t his boy know, then, how much he’s changed? How much Rumplestiltskin loves? How hard he’s worked to try to fix that one, irredeemable mistake?)

It’s the work of moments to teach her how to rip out a heart (she already knew how, didn’t she?) and the work of hours to wait for her with visions and imaginings of a new, less lonely future in store for them, and the work of years to try to heal from what she did to him with so few words.

“Any baby I have…it won’t be yours.”

(Not him, not Rumplestiltskin, not the man who was never meant to be a father, the man whose only worthy gift to his child would have been to die before ever even laying eyes on him.)

Only later (who knows how much later? the passage of time hardly matters at all to an immortal) does he realize that the last time he caught a glimpse of Bae, it was just before he kissed Cora’s shoulder.

(He bowed the neck. He bent his knee. He kissed her foot. He became the spinner again, and like a failure, he cannot hurt her, cannot raise a hand or power against this woman who willingly touched him; like a coward, he waits until someone else can send Cora to her rightful punishment: her daughter, the child she would have traded away. 

She turned him into what he used to be, what he never wants to be again, and for that, he will never forgive her.

For that, he will never forgive himself.)

Bae’s gone, obliterated by Cora’s presence (she broke him, and in doing so, broke the only hope he had left). 

Rumplestiltskin stays up for months at a time, demolishes his entire bedroom, tears apart half the Dark Castle brick by brick with his bare hands before rebuilding it with a wave of magic, but it’s useless. 

He swore to love nothing else, but once again, he broke a promise, and once again, it was a promise he made to his son. It’s only fitting, then, that he is punished for this transgression not only by Cora’s betrayal (by her empty chest and her blank eyes where once there was passion and intelligence and hope), but by the image of his son abandoning him.

(Or is it _he_ who abandoned Bae?)

Only a handful of years left in this world, but they are far, far too many.

Rumplestiltskin retreats to his tower, to the curse he’s written and rewritten, and he revises it once again. Now, when he looks ahead to the caster of his curse (not his daughter, just a girl, some girl who craves vengeance rather than family, a Queen but not a Savior), he ensures that with their banishment to another land, they will no longer remember who they once were.

( _He_ will no longer remember everything he hates inside himself. For a few brief years, he will know peace.)

\---

There are still avenues he hasn’t tried yet. Opportunities he hasn’t fully plumbed. Possibilities he’s ignored in favor of other, more likely ones. After Cora (after hope he didn’t deserve and a future that will never be his), Rumplestiltskin redoubles his efforts. He employs anyone he can find—portal-jumpers and realm-skippers, witches and sages and even a few _scientists_ from a dreary world of no color. He tracks down any and every magical artifact ever whispered about, seeks them all, buys most of them, steals the rest. He becomes absolutely ruthless in his dealings, pulling no punches, granting no favors. 

Baelfire is all that matters. What matter that Cora’s daughter is growing up the child of another man? What business of his is it that she is abused and mistreated by the woman who should know better than anyone how foolish it is to try to dominate anyone? (Why should it bother him that the man chosen to be her father, unwarned by any seers, untouched by any fairy’s meddling, is useless to protect his little girl?)

Nothing. He doesn’t care. In fact, if any of these other leads pay off, he may never have to come face to face with Cora’s daughter, after all.

(Once a coward, always a coward.)

Still, though, Bae doesn’t appear to him. No rewards for the man who came so close to losing everything.

(Impossible, he remembers now that it’s too late, to rewrite this curse for anything _less_ drastic than the heart of the thing you love most. Magic has a price, and even if he’s the one who pays it constantly, others too must bear some of that cost.)

No longer content to leave the work to others, Rumplestiltskin travels to other worlds himself, delving deep into his Sight and manipulating until he owns the people who get him to those worlds (he’ll never trust goodwill again; never believe that anyone could ever _care_ for him enough not to betray him). He hates it, traveling away from home. Away from the world where he’s known and feared and has to do little more than snicker in a high pitch to get what he wants. He’s never been a man well-suited to risking life and limb (and magic) in long shots and far travels. 

But for Bae, it’ll all be worth it. 

(To prove to what little he has left of Bae that he’s not giving up, he’ll do anything.)

Wonderland. A world without color. Oz. Olympus. More and more until they blur all together in his mind. None of them stand out. None of them matter. (Bae is in none of them.) Neverland is the only place he avoids. He tells himself it’s because there’s nothing of use to him there (but he knows better, doesn’t he?).

(Some fathers don’t even admit to mistakes that must be remedied. Some sons are better off without.)

And still, the only time Rumplestiltskin sees his son is when he can fight sleep no longer. Passed out over his potions, slumped on the floor of his tower, he always sees Bae then. Nightmares, mostly, of a hand opening and another, smaller hand slipping away. Of a final screamed denunciation and that horrible, awful condemnation in eyes that had always, _always_ before loved him. 

But occasionally (enough that he keeps letting sleep conquer him every couple months), he dreams of that one Sight he clings to: a black road. A red scarf. Blond curls.

And Bae.

Obscured from sight by the only points of color in the scene, maybe, but Rumplestiltskin knows: it’s Baelfire. _His_ Baelfire. 

He dreams, in his reluctant sleep, of a boy, wary and unsure, who steps closer, listens, looks at his father and sees his papa. He dreams of a hug, of a boy in his arms, his warmth and his weight and his trust and his forgiveness.

Rumplestiltskin hates that dream (no matter that he longs for it). Hates it and avoids it (courts it). Loathes it (yearns for it). Because it’s not true. It’s not Sight, just foolishness.

“I’m coming, Bae,” he whispers over yet another candle lit for his boy’s birthday (the commemoration of a day Rumplestiltskin didn’t even get to see, to share, too busy dragging himself down a cold road as his ankle screamed and his body ached from a beating, mind filled with thoughts of a son he hadn’t yet seen). 

“I’m coming, Bae,” he whispers another year (Cora’s daughter has started riding horses, playing with the stable boy in green fields; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

“I’m coming, Bae,” he whispers another year (Regina spent this day weeping in her useless father’s arms, bruises inflicted by magic all covered up by pastels and tears; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

“I’m coming, Bae,” he whispers the next year (Regina kissed the stable boy, and smiled wider than she ever has before; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

“I’m coming, Bae,” he whispers the next year (Regina held the stable boy’s body in her arms and tried True Love’s Kiss once, again, again, again, while Cora stood pitilessly over her; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

“I’m coming, Bae,” he whispers not quite a year later, and readies himself to go to Regina’s first call.

Just before the smoke envelops him, he sees his boy, come back to him, standing over the cold candle, his bright eyes wishing him well (forgiving him for his newest betrayal).

“Bae,” he whispers, and it’s enough to hide the sting when the girl (who could have been his) asks him _what_ he is (not her father, but Baelfire’s and that’s all he needs; that’s all he cares about).

\---

Around Regina, the future coalesces like a tornado, and standing in the eye of it, she is transformed—from pastel innocence (hidden bruises and seeping fractures) to dark elegance (blackening heart and growing void) to Evil Queen (desolate rubble to mark where once there was a pure soul). It’s not easy, trying to parse out the useful from the superfluous in the maelstrom of futures swirling around this troubled girl, but he has loads of practice and little else to do until she’s completely ready. 

Besides, Bae’s always there now. A baby in the basket of straw at his feet, deep breaths reassuring Rumplestiltskin’s paternal heart. A toddler gamboling through Regina’s austere rooms, laughing and chortling as Rumplestiltskin prepares his final plays. A youngster so curious and earnest and loyal, standing at Rumplestiltskin’s elbow to watch the empty, waiting vials be filled with tangible emotions one by one ‘til there is only the last left clear and void. A boy just as he was the last time Rumplestiltskin saw him, tall and handsome, bold and brave, standing across the great hall and watching Rumplestiltskin from a distance as he deals and barters and manipulates this Queen who could have been his sister.

Snow White grows in beauty and stubbornness, a charming prince receives his grooming on a sheep farm (better training Rumplestiltskin could not have devised himself), a girl’s father dies leaving her to become a cinder maid, Jefferson loses a wife and gains a daughter, Midas makes a deal he didn’t understand, and the Blue Fairy bides her time as always, grooming her own carpenter and conscience and cowed puppet, setting her own pieces in play (too late, too late; she had all the time in the world to plan, but none of the stomach necessary to set up any lasting obstacles). 

And still Baelfire stands before him and watches. Waiting. Withholding judgment until he can tell just how devoted Rumplestiltskin will prove to be.

“I’m coming, Bae,” he says, but Bae doesn’t seem to hear him. _Can’t_ hear him because Rumplestiltskin talks only to himself. 

No boy to chatter about his own day playing with friends and feeding the dogs and seeing to the sheep. No beautiful woman to speak to him of special vengeance and shared resentments. No small daughter to sweep into his arms and twirl on two good ankles and whisper to of a beautiful future.

Nothing that he so briefly let himself imagine.

Just him, alone in an echoing castle with his boy’s eyes always following, forever out of reach. Forever forbidden for Rumplestiltskin to touch. Forever silent.

The spinning wheel creaks so loudly it deafens Rumplestiltskin. His heart pumps so swiftly he can hear nothing else. The silence grows so vast it swallows him whole. 

(Madness creeps closer, stealthy and insidious, beaten back scarcely at all by the sips he steals from a flask.)

So when the ogres rise one last time, when a message arrives with a laughable offer of gold, Rumplestiltskin thinks of a battlefield free of children. He thinks of a field of blood cleared of young sacrifices. He thinks of Bae, smiling at him so proudly (the first real, uninhibited smile he’s given him since Rumplestiltskin long ago told him his plan to steal a dagger from the Duke’s castle). 

He thinks of how shabby (how quiet) his halls have become, how dusty (how lonely) his trophies have grown, and he opens his mouth and names his price.

“My price,” he says, “is her.”

\---

And then Belle. Belle who slips in so quickly, so unexpectedly, that he doesn’t even realize what’s happening until it’s far, far too late. He picked her on a whim, he tells Bae, on the tug of magic toward her (surely a hint that she was the proper price to pay for defeating ogres, a child for peace; what other magic could be strong enough to reach him?), and his foresight shows him nothing at all concerning her (she’s an oasis of silence, of peace, next to the constant chaos of Regina), and what danger at all could this magicless young girl pose him?

Nothing, of course. He’s come too far to be distracted by eyes bluer than the sky or giggles that share joy with him rather than take it at his expense. She is here merely to dust the place, make it look nice once more (Dark it may be, but he still has his pride, doesn’t he?), and maybe provide him a bit of conversation when the silence grows too overwhelming. 

It takes him a while to notice that she’s everywhere (this girl who was supposed to be relegated to a corner whenever he wasn’t consciously thinking of her and needing idle amusement): in the mopped entry, the dusted trophies, the open curtains, the smell of roses, the chipped cup never far from reach. She fills the castle (his life) with light and hope and possibilities that should be _im_ possible. 

She is so unexpected, so different from anyone or anything he has never known before, that it doesn’t occur to him (old fool that he is) what’s happening until there’s no escape. 

“So,” she says one day as she adds the perfect amount of sugar to his tea. “The library.”

“Best dusted room in the whole castle, I imagine,” he sneers even as he hovers, near but not too near, distant but not too distant (drawn like a moth to flame that will disintegrate it the moment it reaches to touch). 

“It’s funny.” Her mouth is curved up in that smile she’s begun giving him since that day in the forest, when magic failed him and an arrow missed its target and she saw in that moment some pretty picture of kindness. “When I first came here, I explored quite a bit of the castle. When I peeked into that tower where the library is now…it was just a dusty storeroom.”

Her fingers brush his as she hands him the cup, chipped and warm and too small because her fingers _always_ brush his during these handoffs. He wants (oh, how he _wants_ ) to believe it’s purposeful, but it’s a small cup and maybe he lingers near her more than he should. Just because she’s different. Intriguing. Something not nearly as boring as the rest of his empty, echoing castle.

“You probably got lost,” he says after a moment, when her hand has fallen away and he’s tucked away the memory of her gentle touch somewhere deep inside his twisted heart. “Are you sure you’re thinking of the same tower?”

“I’m actually not bad with directions,” she says, and for all that she’s pouring tea, he could swear there’s a teasing note in her voice. For _him_. The beast who stole her away from her family.

“No doubt why you always end up in that library instead of in dusty hallways that need a maid’s attention.”

She raises her own cup to her lips (when did she start drinking tea with him, anyway?), still smiling, a curve of her lips that invites him to share in some secret with her (but _what_ secret? Belle is one of the very few things in his life untouched by his path to the future). “Hmm,” she says. No trace of fear to be caught out by the monster. No hint of trepidation to have the library he gifted her taken away. Nothing but gentleness and humor and…fondness? No, it must be a trick. A secret. A bit of misplaced confidence he’ll surely disappoint out of her eventually.

“Well, anyway…” Belle sets her cup on the table, so near to where he’s leaning that Rumplestiltskin feels his breath catch in his throat. She’s closer than he realized, so near that his skin buzzes with something a lot like anticipation (but no touching, he reminds himself; maybe she’s real and not a delusion, but still she is not his to touch). “I was just going to say thank you, again. It’s the best thing anyone’s ever given me.”

With another smile (she gives them out as if there is a limitless supply of them, though Rumplestiltskin’s experience tells him that any form of approval is finite), she brushes her hand over his and wanders from the room. 

Rumplestiltskin stares down at his hand, at the place she touched (on _purpose_!), and wonders what magic this Belle is.

She smiles at him without expectation. She laughs with him without ulterior motive. She asks after him in ways no one (not even Cora; especially not Milah) has ever bothered to. She’s scared when he’s harmed and happy when he returns to her and delighted to talk with him or read to him. She’s warm and slight and fragile in his arms (clumsy little maid, always falling and tripping and stumbling; foolish little girl, always hugging and clasping hands and brushing against his sleeves), and her eyes are wide and open and her breaths are short and staggered and she doesn’t flinch away (doesn’t bat her eyes and conjure up lust and rip out her own heart like Cora), and Rumplestiltskin is caught unawares.

He dares to draw nearer, to open up conversations, to gift her small tokens, to reveal (once more, but this time, he _chooses_ to) the existence of his son, and all the time, he thinks it is curiosity. Intrigue. Academic interest. Research, even, into who this woman is, so curious and compassionate and brave and kind.

(He does not think of a spinner, long ago, drawn to the beauty of a dark-haired, light-eyed woman, edging closer, risking timid jokes to make her laugh, gifting small tokens of his affection, until he could finally propose to her, offer to share his humble livelihood with her. He does not let himself consider how the Dark One grows quiescent and tame beneath Belle’s attention.

Above all, he does not think on how silent and dark his Sight is concerning her—and on how the only other thing his foresight hides from him is his boy. He cannot think on how his emotions cloud the clarity of the future. He cannot allow himself to realize just how much this clumsy, foolish, _wonderful_ woman matters to him.)

And for a while, Rumplestiltskin lets himself…be happy. Or at least, content (he can’t be happy, not really, not without Bae). Pleasantly fond of his life. Certainly not _un_ happy.

Deals seem less important. Regina’s trials seem less pressing. Bae’s growing absence seems less alarming (he’s going to find him anyway, here soon, the _real_ Bae, the one who might choose never to forgive him; and in the meantime, he grasps at what happiness he can). 

He should have known that Bae’s fading was a warning. He should have remembered Cora, should have armored himself against anything that could distract him. But he is weak, so he forgets. He is selfish, so he lets down his guard. He is afraid, so he allows himself to stall.

It’s not until he’s holding a rose that could have been instead a favor owed him from a powerful man, until he’s smiling and bowing ( _bowing_ , when he swore never to bow again!), that he realizes what he has done. What he has allowed. (How far he has fallen.)

He loves her, this Belle of brightness and light and goodness and sweetness and everything he isn’t (everything he can never have). He took something beautiful and he caged it, and then he let himself imagine that it could ever be his. That he could do anything other than darken it, sully it, destroy it. 

She sits on the table before him, leans closer, closer, and how could he have thought she’d ever _really_ care for him? She’s compassionate and curious, and in those things, he has fooled himself into seeing something different. 

And Bae is nowhere in Sight.

So he lets her go.

\---

Cora was dark and vengeful and beautiful, yes, but a brittle, dangerous beauty—and even her, he had a hard time believing could be his. 

But Belle…Belle is pure. She’s a hero, and he’s a monster, and the only hero that might ever be his is his precious boy.

It’s better that he be alone. It’s best that he focus everything he is, every moment left to him in this world, on crafting the perfect apology for his son.

What matter that he can’t move from the window in his tower? He can do his best thinking, sometimes, when he is still and silent. So what if he cannot tear his eyes from the road where Belle disappeared from his life? It’s not like she’ll ever come back, and anyway, the road is as good a place to look as anywhere. 

The sight of Belle walking up the road ( _toward_ the Dark Castle) is so enchanting that for a long moment Rumplestiltskin doesn’t even register it. It’s a delusion, he’s sure, and spares a thought to wonder why his subconscious didn’t place Bae at her side to really complete the picture. 

But his wards twinge as she passes through them (and if he really was as sure as he thought, why didn’t he lock her out?) and it’s her. Belle. The impossible, incredible girl. 

She’s come back.

It’s everything he’s only just realized that he wants, and instead of being smart, he is a fool. Instead of being strong, he is weak. Instead of being noble and self-sacrificing, he is selfish and covetous and greedy.

(But how could he have known? How could he have ever guessed that she would kiss him? That she would _want_ him? That she could care for him? It was so far outside the probable that even his Sight had no warning of it.)

She tames him with a touch, gentles him with a smile—and destroys him with a kiss.

A single kiss ( _one kiss_ when he and Cora exchanged hundreds without ever budging his curse!) and Bae is nearly ripped from his arms once again. A single kiss (that he leans into, that he _wants_ with a familiar desperation, that he is left dazed and dull by) and all his sins, all his crimes, his murders and his machinations, are nearly for nothing. A single kiss (the perfect kiss, so sweet and chaste and overwhelming after centuries of dark isolation; the merest brush of grace and light and beauty almost unfathomable to him) and she comes closer to crushing him than anything since Pan showed up to steal his son away, since the Blue Fairy finished the job.

(And how can she possibly care for him? How can she find anything in his messy, raw brokenness worthy of her light and her touch and her joy? It’s a trick, it’s a ploy, it’s an attack, it’s _anything_ but what it seems because slow as he is, even he has long learned his lesson, knows better than to expect anything good to happen to him—and Belle is the most, the best _good_ he has ever encountered in his long, long life.)

He sends her away, but it’s too late. This is one betrayal too many (the third time he’s let go of his son’s hand and watched him fall away), and Bae is gone. Gone forever until Rumplestiltskin can break magical laws and transcend realms to buy his single moment with Baelfire, to fall on his knees (kneel before the one person who deserves his fealty) and accept whatever judgement his boy sees fit to pronounce on him.

(And if he dreams of falling on his knees before Belle, if he dreams of sweeping her up in his arms and dropping kisses over her cheeks and brow and lips, if he dreams that she cared about him more than just as a lost soul needing salvation…well, they are only dreams, after all.

And if he wakes up weeping, wishing with all his might that his dreams were at all touched by foresight…well, he has always been a foolish man who hopes for far more than he’s ever deserved.)

\---

Bae doesn’t watch him mix potions anymore, or sleep to the rhythm of the spinning wheel, or play happily as he makes deals. He’s just gone, leaving the Castle emptier than ever, and echoing with not one, but _two_ ghosts (or is that three? surely he himself is little more than a ghostly phantom now, withered away in all his long centuries of loneliness).

Now it is Belle he sees everywhere. A flick of blue skirts around the bend. The sound of her voice outside the door. A wisp of her perfume beside his wheel. 

She _could_ come back; she’s stubborn enough even if she can’t love him (anymore). 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers to the rattle of tea things behind him. 

“I thought you would rip out my heart instead of your own,” he tells her cup, tucked away so innocently behind a dozen other unimportant cups.

“No one’s ever wanted good things for me,” he tries to explain. “Only Bae, and I can’t lose him again. I _can’t_.”

“All I could have given you,” he weeps into his hands, jarred awake from a dream so beautiful it makes his chest ache until he can hardly breathe, “is darkness and isolation. And you deserve better, so much better than to be sullied by my love.”

(But if she chooses him… If she comes back of her own accord… He has never been good at saying no to temptation.)

\---

“Flimsy locks,” Regina says as she strolls into his hall (as if he’d locked the doors at all, not when Belle could wander back in at any moment, so righteously angry and empathetically understanding). 

For once, Rumplestiltskin doesn’t see a girl who might have been (a girl he could have rescued, could have groomed, could have invited close even without any blood ties). For once, he sees the Evil Queen everyone else does.

“I’m not dealing today,” he says.

“Is this about that girl I met on the road?” she asks, and Rumplestiltskin almost cannot move to hear Belle’s existence confirmed by someone else (he’d begun to wonder if his madness had been sneakier than ever, if his cowardice had woven a beautiful mirage for him, if his inherent flaws had broken the delusion before it could completely play out). 

Then she speaks of tragedy, and Rumplestiltskin is in the eye of the storm with Regina, surrounded by possibilities—he sees first a lonely and outcast Belle, one he can usher home and coddle and protect and start over with. He sees a beaten and bloody Belle, one he will rescue and avenge and heal and start over with. He sees a defiant and unbowed Belle, perched over a high drop and waiting for him to catch her up and save her and shelter her and start over with her.

And he sees a pale and blue Belle, unbreathing, unsmiling, unlaughing. Dead, dead, dead, and there is no starting over because he’s already played out their last moments (filled them with lies and coldness and silence and hurt; he let her go just as surely as he did his son, and he thought it the one good thing he could do but it was just as much a crime as the first time). 

The possibilities coalesce until there is only a single form before him. Tall and imperious, cloaked in black he painted over her, her bruises turned into stains turned into cruelty, and one day he will need her (but not love her), but not this day (one day he will be just as cruel and gleeful and condescending when it is _her_ loved one to be turned into a corpse).

The door slams behind Regina’s parting shot. Rumplestiltskin is alone. The chipped cup calls to him, suffocated and overwhelmed in the cabinet. He can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t do anything but cradle the cup (so, so carefully, as carefully as he should have handled Belle herself) and set it out where he can be punished by sight of it every day (too little, too late).

The clink of the cup on the plinth and Belle comes out of hiding. 

No longer in the corners of his eye, just out of sight, just within earshot, now she stands where once Bae did. She watches him cry, but when she reaches out (to hold him? to strike him?), he flinches away (he cannot watch her vanish as Bae did). She stands at his elbow as he commiserates with a heartbroken Snow in return for one of her hairs. She greets him when he returns home from casting a protection spell over the two future parents whose True Love glows from that last vial. She brings him tea while he writes the last finishing touches of his Dark Curse (and if it’s more geared toward separating all True Love couples now, well, it _is_ called the Dark Curse for a reason) and watches disapprovingly as he gives it to Regina.

“It’s necessary,” he murmurs, and Belle shakes her head. So disappointed in him. So sad for him. So willing to chivvy him out of his dark mood with a cup of tea—only he can’t take it from her because that would mean watching her fizzle away into nothing (it would mean admitting she isn’t real and never will be again).

Bae’s birthday comes, and much as Rumplestiltskin wishes to glimpse another sight of his boy, it is only Belle there, bursting into the room and refusing to leave even when he tells her to go away (it’s all he ever tells her, isn’t it?) and snuffs the candle (he always had so little to give his boy, but that’s the one thing he made sure to always do for him, even back before power: light him a candle and give him a wish).

“I’m so sorry,” Belle says, and Rumplestiltskin feels his shoulders hunch in on himself (she so rarely talks to him). “It was a remembrance, wasn’t it? How old would he be?”

She’s touching Bae’s shawl. Her hand only an inch or two from his claws, so close and yet so far. It’s almost mesmerizing, to see another hand next to his (even if it is only a delusion). 

“Well, he’s not dead,” he hears himself say. “He’s just lost.”

(He promised her this story, after all, a deal he…didn’t break, but didn’t have time to fulfill. Now, in some way, it’s come due.)

“Lost?” 

“Today is his birthday,” Rumplestiltskin says, a near whisper he knows she will hear anyway (she always heard the things he couldn’t say). “I should be with him…celebrating. We had a chance to be happy together, but I was afraid.”

(Is he talking about Bae? Or Belle? Not that it really matters, he knows; he lost them both in the same way: because he is too afraid to hold on long enough for _them_ to let _him_ go like his father did.)

“Maybe it’s not too late,” this vision of Belle says, all hope and faith and goodness.

“I hope not,” he says, but then has to move away from the desperation coating those words. (Hope has never done anything but set him up for pain.) “No,” he realizes anew as he hears the deafening sound of his loneliness (unbroken by Belle’s breathing or heartbeat or anything _real_ ), “my ending shall not be a happy one.”

“Rumple,” she murmurs, but he doesn’t say anything more. He can’t. What could he possibly say anyway? 

He can’t apologize because he hasn’t changed his mind. She is better off without him. Even dead, the method of it should prove why any association with him is a bad idea. 

He can’t tell her he wishes he could have kissed her again because it would be a lie. Even if it weren’t for Bae, for his promise (already broken twice-over), he’d be lying. He’s come too far, made too many enemies, burned too many bridges, has too many pieces developed over centuries now finally in play for him to give up his power (to go back to being the crippled coward that even Belle could do no more than pity). 

No. There’s nothing to say because all his monstrous words are nothing; she deserves so much more, so much better. 

(Better silence, he thinks, than lies.)

\---

This world holds nothing for him any longer. His fascination with Regina has played itself out. The usefulness of the Charming couple is near its end. The cinder maid plays her part and Rumplestiltskin is almost happy to let the squid ink paralyze him. Finally, _finally_ , his remaining time here is measured in months rather than in years. 

The cell itches, the key shaped as ink in a bottle in a pocket burns against him, and he chafes to be free (to never again be weak, humiliated and ground into the dirt). But, ah, he’s still in control here, and it’s never bothered him to appear less than he is if he knows there will be a pay-off. Patience, he cautions himself, once, again, again, countless times as his patience evaporates, the well run dry just before the end.

And here, locked away with a key in hand, it becomes so much harder to ignore her.

Waiting, waiting, _waiting_ , and she’s there constantly. Always watching him with a chipped cup of tea at her elbow and a sweet smile on her face.

“Tell me about your son,” she says, and he turns his face into a corner and shrieks into the night. 

“And since then, you’ve loved no one, and no one has loved you,” she says, and he throws himself against the bars until blood runs red and black and glistening in the dark. 

“All you’ll have—” she starts to say, and he turns on her.

“You think I don’t know my heart’s empty?” he snarls at her (she should have known, she _always_ should have known better than to taunt the beast). “You think I need the reminder? I’ve had an empty heart far longer than you’ve been alive, dearie. That’s what all of this is for, don’t you see that? Everything I’ve done, _you_ —” 

No, no, no! Somehow he’s slipped from snarling to begging. And much as the superstitious guards keep their distance, sound travels oddly down here among the fairy dust and dwarf blood. He hasn’t come this far, kept his secret this long, just to falter here at the finish line.

So he turns to insanity. Madness has always been there, creeping in at the edges, overwhelming him for a moment here, a decade there, slinking back to the shadows only to dart out and strike in unguarded days. Now, with Emma’s name written until his ink is gone (the Savior tied to that drop of True Love on that scroll Regina has just stolen back from Maleficent), with his foresight turned to maddeningly tantalizing glimpses of a world stranger than any other he’s ever seen—with Belle there on one side of his cell and Bae sitting on the other side—Rumplestiltskin retreats into the safety of that madness. Hides in the corners of the cell where neither of his ghosts can reach him. Both of them watching, judging, _understanding_ , pleading, all too much. It threatens to bring secrets spewing up out of his blackened mouth. Threatens to ruin everything, trip him up here at the end. Only, he’s not lame anymore; smooth, prancing steps that glide seamlessly forward are the norm now.

The madness buys him Regina’s complacence, earns him a last deal here where his magic is strongest, and then the centuries-become-decades-become-years-become-months-become-days now trickle down to a handful of hours. 

“Bae,” he croons. His guards are long gone. Panic sweeps the land. This curse, greater than any other ever written, sum of all his knowledge and deals and life’s blood, boils up to seek out every corner of their world, touches and influences adjoining realms, and Rumplestiltskin takes in a deep breath of purple smoke and powerful magic that strums familiarly against his hollow heart. 

On his left, Belle vanishes, subsumed in magic. Rumplestiltskin shuts his eyes before he can watch the same happen to Bae (Belle is gone, dead, beyond the reach of curses, but Bae is his future).

Rumplestiltskin disappears with Bae’s name the very last word uttered in the Enchanted Forest.


	2. The Spinner

Mr. Gold’s life is comprised of a dull present bookended by a blank past and a featureless future with nothing and no one to stand out from the endless monotony. Every day, his life is the same. Every day, he does the same things, speaks to the same people, eats the same dinner, waits for the same debts to be called due. But at night…oh, at night, things are so different.

While sleeping, he sees a boy (earnest and brave, smiling but somber too), dark-haired, bright-eyed, a warm and trusting weight that leans so easily against Gold’s side. A hand that slips into his (tight, so tight it will never let go of his). Steps that steady Gold’s. _Papa_ , the boy cries, and Gold jerks awake with a name just at the tip of his tongue.

He dreams of a woman little more than a girl (but so wise, sage understanding shining in true blue), dark-haired, bright-eyed, a soft and teasing smile that reaches out to him at even his darkest. The taste of sugared tea. The feel of warm curves resting in his arms, her drop arrested while he is propelled into freefall. Every time he reaches for her, dares to try to touch her kindness, she evaporates, jolting Gold awake to a room empty of everything but a chipped cup he’s never gotten around to tossing out.

Nightmares, he deems them, as proven by the gaping grief they leave in their wake, the frightened drumming of his heart, the tears in his eyes. Nightmares, yet he craves them. _Needs_ them. They steal his sleep, but he seeks sleep ever more desperately, wanting just one more glimpse of blue eyes, one more moment to clasp the boy close. Nightmares, but they’re all he really lives for anymore.

At one point (a few weeks ago? months? has it really been years already?), the mayor comes to him for a baby, and he procures a boy for her. Not a simple proposition, but worth it to have a favor owed him by the mayor. But there’s something…something about bringing a child to his parent that makes his heart twist in his chest (with longing? or is it envy?), that makes his hands shake as he reaches down to brush a fingertip over the baby’s nose. 

The dreams after that are particularly intense. For the first time, he sees both the boy and the woman together in the same night, one after the other, this pseudo-family that has never been (will never be) his. 

He wakes alone, cold and shivering and reaching out for something that’s not there (will never be there), names sitting at the tip of his tongue but too heavy, too ponderous (too painful) to actually be released into the dark.

Then, one evening after a day like any (every) other, he meets a stranger and emerges with a familiar name superseding the blank slate that was Mr. Gold (Regina’s idea of comfort, he thinks, is a blank past and the absence of any enemies, any lovers, anything but cold power). 

_Emma_.

He remembers ink scrawled endlessly in his best penmanship over a scroll that will one day, in some way he never could quite see, come in handy once again. He remembers a desperate couple and a hasty deal and a name that made the cell and the bars and the fairy dust itching over his skin all worth it.

_Emma_.

A name important only in that it brings two others with it.

_Baelfire_.

_Belle_.

The only two people who have ever loved him (she did, she did, he thought it over for days on end in that cell with her eyes a ghostly weight on his back; she _did_ love him, enough to break his curse and deconstruct him back to the basest elements of himself; not enough to stay). The two people he lost and drove away and lost all over again (but he will find him, he _will_ , he must, it is all that is left to him, this unending search for his boy).

His hands shake. His heart trips against his ribs. The world seems too big, too loud, too overwhelming, as he stumbles up to his bedroom. The cup ( _her_ cup) sits there, mocking him. It’s cool in his hands, soothing him before he sets it so carefully on a pillow. Rumplestiltskin doesn’t even bother to undress before diving into bed, his hands reaching up to yank the pillow closer, and the shawl is there, tucked beneath so unassumingly that Mr. Gold never thought anything of shaking it clean every morning of the creases his hands crushed into it through endless nights. Bae in his hands, Belle at his side, Rumplestiltskin slams his eyes closed and claws for sleep.

He needs to see them again, to see them and _know_ who they are, where they are, just how much he deserves to be taunted by them.

(He wrote blissful ignorance into his Curse, imagined peace, but instead he was only tormented by faces he couldn’t name; nothing changed save that he didn’t know _why_ he felt so guilty over them.)

Eventually, his thrumming mind shuts down enough to let him slip into unconsciousness.

Mr. Gold was granted golden-hazed memories of trust, of friendship, of support, of _love_.

Rumplestiltskin falls into damning memories of a small hand slipping out of his own (that’s what he tells himself anyway; better that than remembering his own hand _opening_ wide). A beautiful, triumphant smile twisting into restrained tears and tight anger and bitter parting words. _Papa_! Bae cries, an accusation that strikes deep as green light swallows him up. Belle turns her back and walks away, walks toward the place he’d promised her would be safe—walks to her torment and death.

When Rumplestiltskin jerks awake, so violently that he falls to the floor with a heavy thud and a blaze of pain in his ankle, he’s weeping in relief. In joy. In mingled pain and love (and that’s the only way he’ll ever feel love, isn’t it, all mixed up together with guilt and shame and desperation and loss).

It worked. He’s here, finally, after all those centuries of darkness and isolation and endless, twisted tedium. He’s here. He remembers. He will never forget Belle again and he will find Baelfire. He’s not alone. His ghosts are back, there to keep him focused, fixed on the straight and narrow way to his long-belated, always-lacking apology.

It’s easy to keep his blank façade, a mask just opaque enough to let hints of Rumplestiltskin’s cunning and malice edge through. Easy to move his pawns, nudge his rooks, inflict a little vengeance on his insect-winged bishops, outmaneuver his black queen and bring into play his white knight. So, so easy, almost too easy really (this is his atonement, his proof that he will do anything, _anything_ -like-let-Belle-go-to-her-death, to reunite with his son, and the task must be hard, it must be arduous, it must be a _sacrifice_ ), but excruciating for all that because the town line is so close, oh so far away. Easy because though Bae and Belle never come anymore while he’s awake (Gold’s linear rationality staves away the Dark One’s easy insanity), they are always there, waiting for him when he sleeps.

Belle, constantly nearby, reading, cleaning, setting out tea, tearing down all his curtains (so much light emanating from her, but never enough to pierce through the shadows that cloak him), always, _always_ walking away.

Baelfire, always just out of reach, waiting, condemning, angry, abandoned, the specter of a child-father lurking there in his shadow. Always waiting but always silent.

Like scourges, like flaying, they castigate him for all his failures. As he deserves. He hasn’t earned Gold’s easy acceptance, his empty life, his lack of memories to regret. He deserves this reminder of why he is where he is. Why _everyone_ is here.

The Savior with her armor of cynicism and the blatant vulnerability open over her heart. The Queen with her empty victory and little-girl eyes and lost heart. The cricket made an ineffectual conscience and the wolf-girl become an easy woman and the doctor brave enough to fight even death now completely uncaring about all life-and-death matters. The princess-turned-thief-turned-queen now meek and quiet and pushing away everything that could make her happy. The shepherd-turned-prince-turned-hero lost and drifting, helpless to save or protect or do anything but inflict harm. All of them here, all of them paying the price for Rumplestiltskin’s long ago crime.

Sacrifices made in his hopes for a single hug, a single smile, a single _Papa_ , from his son.

“It’s my son,” he tells Belle’s memory in the cup. “You’d understand, wouldn’t you? For my little boy. It’s all worth it. _He’s_ worth it. You asked me about him, remember? Three-hundred years and you’re the only one who ever asked. Of course you’d understand.”

But then, he’ll never know now, will he?

Still, he comforts himself with the cup, taking it from his house to his shop so he can look at it all through the endless days, so he can caress it with lanolin-scented and soot-stained fingers, flick his eyes to it after setting aside a blank card he pretended had a name written across it, remind himself of all he has already given up in exchange for the boy who will play with that tattered ball set in pride of place at the front of the shop. He takes the cup back to his house so he can wrap it in Bae’s old yellow shawl and imagine another future, a sight he _wishes_ were foresight, Belle and Bae side by side, laughing together, both so brave and bold and beautiful, both so much more than he could ever deserve to even look at (but _his_ , in a way no one else ever has been).

And then, one day, the cup is stolen.

\---

Belle is gone. Ripped away from him by the same man twice. She’s gone forever, no sentimental keepsakes to hold onto (a facsimile of what he failed to do with the woman), no way to remind himself that she was _real_ , she cared for him, smiled at him, laughed at his quips, told him he wasn’t a monster (a lie, he and Bae know, but a kind one, a glamour she fashioned for him as a gift), _touched_ him (not with anger or with lust but with acceptance, wonder, friendship, _hope_ ), looked at the beast and saw a man. Without the cup, she might as well have been a dream he dreamed up in his loneliness ( _I think you were lonely_ ), and for the first time since he’s arrived in Storybrooke (in this world without magic), Rumplestiltskin is awake when he sees Bae stand in front of him.

Mute. Accusing. _Knowing_ (his boy knew this is how it would all turn out: all Rumplestiltskin’s power, all his promises, all the legends and rumors and whispers he has cultivated around him, and still he is just as ineffectual as that lame spinner who couldn’t keep a wife, couldn’t save a son).

Rumplestiltskin goes mad. It happens so quickly, so seamlessly, that all of the Dark One’s control and Mr. Gold’s rationality are swept aside in the blink of an eye. In the wash of cold fury and glacial rage, he forgets to be careful, to hide his hand, to play his quiet, long game.

“Let’s just say bad things tend to happen to bad people,” he tells the white knight, and is rewarded by a furrow in her brow. She wants something to protect, something to save, but he can’t give her that because the cup is _his_ and he’s a monster and the man who’s taken Belle from him…well, he is, all in one, a father who let go and a man who rejected love and a debtor who can’t scrabble enough living from the dirt to pay the price. 

“You’ve recovered nothing,” he says when the Savior parades her recovered tableware before him, smug and triumphant and _useless_ (the heroes always do this, always save _others_ , swoop in to protect _others_ , throw themselves between danger and _others_ ; but they never saved Bae, never swooped in to make sure Bae still had the papa he wanted and the world he would never be alone in, never threw themselves between Belle and the punishment his mere presence brought down on her). 

All these years. All the sacrifices. All the darkness and the crimes and the sins and the twisted things he did in the dark. All of it, and still he’s recovered nothing (only lost more and more and more until he is less than nothing, he’s a void, a negative number, a null that just keeps devouring everything light and good).

Madness is terrifying and seductive. Emboldening and blinding. It grants him unholy strength and steals cunning patience. He is cold and still and small in his own mind as he ushers this parody of a father into a dark, quiet place. He is fierce and demented and unleashed as he rains down punishment on this broken man. If anyone knows what it is to be left bound and helpless in the dark, alone with the night, it is him. If anyone knows the feeling of countless (self-inflicted) blows formed of regret and abandonment and loss and guilt, it is him.

True to form, the Savior arrives only in time to save anyone who isn’t him or his, and for just an instant (a terrifying instant where that single glimpse of the future with red scarf and blonde curls and _Bae_ wavers and dulls and nearly fades away), he is tempted to take her throat in his hands and bash her golden curls against the wall and scratch gouges through the eyes that just _won’t believe_!

Just an instant, but it shocks him into momentary immobility, and from there into transient sanity. 

He so seldom loses control when it matters, but this lapse has given away everything to Her Majesty, threatens all he’s worked for with the Savior. No matter. All of that fades to nothing in comparison to how good it feels to have finally, _finally_ , confronted the man who stole Belle from him. All of it is worth the feel of the cup against his palm, once more safe (for now) in his hands.

And Bae—his beautiful boy—stayed with him through it all. Watched as he captured the king-turned-florist, sat beside him in the van, accompanied him into the cabin. Not approving, no, never that (Bae is kind, is forgiving, is naïve, and could never understand the ways Rumplestiltskin had to protect him), but maybe…supportive. Yes, of course. Finally, Rumplestiltskin fights for the ones he loves rather than simply letting them go. Finally he is brave and confrontational, willing to fight for what is his, and his reward is Bae’s presence, the sight of him like a reminder of what he has still to gain.

As soon as the chipped cup is returned and the Queen leaves with the last word clutched like shallow victory in her grasping hands, Bae vanishes. Rumplestiltskin keeps his eyes locked on the porcelain so that he doesn’t lose his sanity yet again (he’s not sure how much he reclaims with each lapse). Another cell (bars as green as a family-devouring portal), another vision here in this Sightless world, but he clutches close his mementos of the past and memories of the promise he’s been given: that image of Bae on a black street, the Savior’s golden hair and red scarf obscuring sight of his boy beyond the hint of a vague outline.

All he has left of Belle. All he has to look forward to with Bae.

But _enough_. Enough of a happy ending for this sad, haunted villain he has become.

\---

Now that his name has been spoken aloud (now that he’s seen Bae again), impatience surges. Urgency sings through him. The feeling that something important, something game-changing, is imminent thrums like a constant pulse under the normal mundanity of Storybrooke. The only defense he has against rash decisions (against the temptation to stop counting costs and weighing prices and start drowning manipulation in blood) is the dreams (nightmares) of Bae and Belle.

In his nightmares (dreams), Belle draws nearer, steps closer, reaches for him past legend and terror and sense, while Bae becomes ever more remote, distant, the face he has seared into his immortal memory (engraved it deeper on his heart than his name on the Dark One’s dagger) growing ever more blurry, the familiar shape morphing to something bigger, taller, broader. The eyes remain the same, though. Waiting. Weighing. Caught eternally between forgiveness and damnation.

Soon it will be his _real_ son looking at him; the last thing he needs is a trail of fresh bodies lying between them. So Rumplestiltskin keeps his methods clean, avoids murder, uses tricks and loopholes and _pleases_ to stay ahead of the slowly deteriorating curse and the quickly eroding Queen. 

It’s tedious, and more than once Rumplestiltskin’s fingers tingle with wanting to deal out death to the Savior. If her heart stops, after all, the Curse vanishes. It’d be so easy, so quick, so _relieving_ as Emma’s stubbornness drags this out interminably. But no, no, no. Too many uncertainties surround the consequences of that—his Sight touched this world only sparingly, visions eked out between eons of magicless existence. Besides, it took him only a second to recognize her blonde curls and her penchant for red (a stretch of black asphalt, skyscrapers bracketing the Sight, red and gold just blocking view of his boy, _Bae_ , alive and well and in arm’s reach). 

And…and Belle’s imagined smile becomes a frown. The chipped cup seems too fragile to withstand even the most delicate of his touches (though he longs to cradle it close). And Bae (his sweet, compassionate boy) would scowl and turn away. Would think his papa hadn’t changed at all during their long separation. 

Better, in the end, to let the Savior’s favor to him stand. After all, even as Mr. Gold, no one breaks deals with him. That day, that Sight, _will_ come true.

His son is close, so close he can nearly taste the terror. 

And then, one day, with an encounter with a man so unafraid of him that he sneaks into the back of his shop, with a few reluctant words with a woman who used to be a fairy (who might, he sometimes suspects, _remember_ that she is a fairy; she had centuries to plan for this curse, too, after all), with a hope and a prayer and impatience, the moment is actually upon him.

His son is here.

(Everything he has done to come for his son, and it’s his son, the hero, the brave, good boy that he is, who finds _him_.)

\---

Like the coward he is, Rumplestiltskin flees to the cricket for help. A part of him hates himself for it (looks at this earnest man and remembers a son too afraid to leave his parents, a desperate soul turning to magic when simple decisiveness would have done the trick), but the rest of him knows he needs help. (If he’d had someone to talk to way back in the first Ogre’s War, if he’d had someone to talk things over with him even then, would he still have wrapped his hand around that mallet and set his fate…or would they have found another way to get him back to his boy?) 

“He’s not the one that needs to be…” says Rumplestiltskin (and it is Rumplestiltskin here, Mr. Gold shed to reveal the misshapen thing left behind in the wisps of decaying cocoon) and cannot look up to see whatever shines there in this good man’s eyes. “I think he might still be very angry.”

A green portal. Sickly light shining everywhere, sucking everything good and hopeful down its gaping maw. His boy, so brave, so _good_ , so willing and able and ready to give up everything to save his papa (to save him from his own flaws and faults and failures by fleeing this world for another, and hasn’t this story already played itself out?). His hand wrapped in his, unflinching, trusting (demanding, pleading, tugging and pulling him back to the craven coward he’d been; wanting, asking, inviting him to a better man away from con jobs and lies and angry beatings). 

And then the anger. The word ( _the_ word that defines him and traps him and will never, ever leave him be). The eyes that had always before looked at Rumplestiltskin and shone (except for one morning, on his birthday when instead of lighting a candle, Rumplestiltskin had lit a castle, and instead of giving him nothing but crumbs, he’d laid out bloody bodies at his feet and ended the Ogre’s War to commemorate both the birth of his son and the death of the coward born on that battlefield) had turned dark and hard and angry (like Milah’s as the hungry days crept by and the tavern grew ever more appealing; like Milah’s on the deck of a ship with his heart ripped out between them and crushed beneath her casual dismissal of his son). 

And then nothing. The hand gone from his. The green light vanished. The portal disappeared. And Rumplestiltskin once more stuck on the wrong side of it (and Bae had gotten his wish then: the Dark One had disappeared to reveal the man still digging in the dirt and making apologies in a vain attempt to win back the love of those he failed).

The cricket’s saying something about anger being natural or something equally banal, and with that as dubious shield, Rumplestiltskin’s finally able to put to words the thought swimming in his head since he lifted up a blank page to behold the greatest secret he and Bae once carried together.

“I think he might be here to try to kill me.”

Baelfire had listened to Rumplestiltskin’s plan of stealing the dagger (implicit trust, implied forgiveness, open love all there in the way he’d asked his papa, even with Milah’s ghost between them, what they would do). He’d helped soak the wool, had lit the torch Rumplestiltskin took to set the flames, had waited in the woods and worried for his papa, begged him to return home with him (silly boy, he never knew that home was safety and without power there was never any safety to be found). He’d been alone in the house when Hordor and his men came for him (had he thought, then, that his papa had abandoned him? or had he still trusted, back then, wholly and completely?). 

Rumplestiltskin had become a monster, but once the bodies were hidden and the blood washed away, Baelfire (his precious boy) had been there to touch him, to put his arms around him, to look into his face and search for the papa he knew. His touch had soothed the burn of magic spreading through his veins, the crackle of lightning over his skin, the buzz of voices, dark and angry and twisted, in his mind. 

Only Baelfire had ever been allowed to hold the dagger. Rumplestiltskin still remembers pulling it from his belt to show him, telling the story of Zoso in the woods and the beggar in disguise (but not about the price of magic, no, because then he’d been so sure whatever it was, he’d pay it and leave Bae far away from it all). He remembers placing it in Bae’s hands and not feeling even a flicker of fear about it (or did he? maybe he’s just rewritten this scene in his mind; maybe instead of trust and understanding and love, there was fear and tentativeness and the first cracks in their relationship). Bae had handed the knife back to him, and no matter how he protested and begged for mercy, for clemency, tried everything he could to quiet the maddening buzz in the back of Rumplestiltskin’s skull, he had never once taken the dagger to control him, never once brought up killing Rumplestiltskin to end the beast (like another Rumplestiltskin would come to know, he wanted to defeat the beast through kindness, tame the monster away with love, kill with a kiss).

All these centuries later and Rumplestiltskin has imagined anger, betrayal, abandonment (even, occasionally, when Cora offered him a daughter, when Belle spoke of mysteries and layers and heroes, he’s imagined a moment of forgiveness). But murder? The dagger drawn out in detail so like Milah’s drawings that once wallpapered their hovel. The way this stranger (his son?) was in town so long before venturing to Gold’s shop. The secrecy, the way he went to the fairy for advice…the picture of the dagger.

In all these centuries, for all that he thought he was being realistic about his chances of reconciliation, Rumplestiltskin has not once thought of his boy (his brave, beautiful boy) wanting to kill him.

(But why not? He should have known. Rumplestiltskin corrupts everything he touches, drives everyone who dares to care for him to drastic measures, poisons whatever they once saw in him.)

“I let him go,” he tells Dr. Hopper (no one should think that his boy doesn’t have motivation for what he does; that _he’s_ the villain). “I’ve spent my entire life since trying to fix it, and now, he’s finally here. And I just don’t know what to do.”

“Be honest.” Archie finds some form of confidence. His stutters vanish, his indecisiveness melts away (decades too late), and he is firm, unequivocal, unyielding.

“Honesty’s never been the best color on me,” Rumplestiltskin admits (truth is easy to play with, to tinker and tamper with like a potion with varying measurements, one grain of this almost-deception mixed with that word to lead astray will provide the result he wants).

Archie looks him right in the eye, so stern (so right) that Rumplestiltskin cannot look away. “There’s no other way.”

\---

Whenever he thinks back on this night (which he tries never to do), it is like a vast dark space lit sporadically by bright flashes of lightning that strike with the roll of thunder so great it rumbles through his bones, searching for fault lines, for the places to tap against and send out spiderwebs of cracks ripping through the foundations of his soul.

“Papa,” the puppet boy calls him, and _crack_ goes a part of his heart.

“You were right, Bae,” Rumplestiltskin remembers saying (half-believing it, here in this world without the Dark One curse, and half saying it because it’s what will make his boy listen to him long enough to let him get out this long-delayed apology). 

Strong arms (broad and warm and everything that could have been eclipsed by red scarf and blonde curls) wrap around him, and _crash_ goes a gaping hole in his soul.

“I forgive you, Papa,” whispers the boy (and he is a boy, wood and faults and loss and love and lies all mixed together into a form that finds it so hard to grow now that he’s been cut down and left to rot in a world so far removed from the one that birthed him), and _smash_ goes tumbling down all the walls around his heart to keep him protected.

“I want you to take it,” Rumplestiltskin says, and hands over the knife to the only person he ever really can. His son, there for him through it all, so loyal and stalwart and _trusting_ , and Rumplestiltskin knows, he _knows_ , Bae will never turn it against him.

“I found you and I don’t need it anymore,” he says. “I chose it once. Now I choose you.”

Truth. Truth. Lie. 

(He found Bae, he doesn’t need the dagger anymore. He did choose power over his son, once and never again. But…is he really choosing Bae? Or is this a test? A trap? A trick like a false contract and a seemingly innocent quill and a plan wrapped in layers and layers of foresight? He stayed so close, after all, never moving so far away that he couldn’t grab the knife back from this stranger with maybe-familiar eyes and possibly-familiar expressions.)

“By the power of the Darkness, I command thee, Dark One,” Pinocchio says, but for an instant (an instant when all the worlds and realms and times tremble before the possibilities of a completely unhinged Dark One), it is Bae saying those words. Bae using the dagger against him. Bae looking at his papa and seeing only a monster to be controlled. And crash, smash, crumble and topple, there goes everything keeping him alive and sane and upright.

“You’re not my son,” Rumplestiltskin declares (and it is, in that instant, still just wishful thinking). “You’re not Baelfire.” (And this is the realization, the final bolt of lightning that scorches his every nerve ending, sears every vein, chars his heart to black soot.)

“Do I even look like him at all?” Pinocchio asks, and this is what Rumplestiltskin will never forgive the puppet for (lying, desperation, seeking the upper hand, maneuvering for power: all those are the tricks of the trade, and maybe Pinocchio struck deeper than most, but it’s all still just power plays; but that question, that incredulous tone, that knife embedded in Rumplestiltskin’s smoking heart is the nail in the coffin of whatever alliance he might have crafted with a man the Savior sees as an ally).

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Gold (before he was subsumed in the desperate shreds of Rumplestiltskin) to Dr. Hopper, “I’m just seeing what I want to see.”

He’s a desperate soul still paying the price for his desperation. He’s a papa still grasping for the hand he let go of. He’s a coward still looking for the easiest way out.

(And this _was_ easy, wasn’t it? So easy. An apology, a few words, a couple hundred tears, an outreached hand…and forgiveness was his. Granted and wrapped around him in an embrace meant for another and bound up in the sound of a boy calling for his _Papa_.)

The strobe-like lightning vanishes then, leaving him in a gray featureless haze that sees him numbly retreating to his shop. His dagger in hand, close and safe (no more hiding places in the woods now that the puppet knows to dig endless holes like graves for a piece of his wooden flesh at a time), Rumplestiltskin is lost in a murky mist. 

Purposeless. Empty. Unending.

His son is still out there. His search isn’t over yet. His patience must yet stretch further. His sacrifices have not yet come to an end.

“Bae,” he whispers, and perhaps he is in a heap on the ground amid shards of glass and priceless debris. Perhaps he is back in his home, still weeping, still clutching to the dagger he should have let go of countless birthdays ago, bundling an old shawl to his chest to soak up the unceasing tears. Perhaps he is still trapped in a cell made of fairy dust and dwarven blood and aimless, mad hope, dreaming of a world reached through an impossible curse and a chance still to find his boy. Perhaps he is in the woods, holding onto a branch in the shape of a dagger, raving to shadows that look like the drape of a dark cloak, still imagining he can find a way to save the boy already dragged off to become bloody fodder for the ogres.

Bae is the only thing that is real, the talisman he keeps close. 

“Bae,” he whispers, because with its utterance a father was born from the ashes of an abandoned son. Because with its utterance a world was ended and a new one began. Because with its utterance, he builds himself back up, piece by piece at a time.

He’s a desperate soul willing to pay any price for his son. He’s a father who will never let go of his son. He’s a coward made the Dark One with power and magic and cunning and immortality all bent toward the aims of recovering his son.

“Bae,” he whispers (his tears are gone, and in their place is unswerving devotion).

\---

His boy avoids him. No more half-caught glimpses. No more half-felt touches. Nothing.

Rumplestiltskin can’t blame him. 

He swore to do anything and everything no matter the cost, and at the first sign of an easy fix, he turned aside. It’s like Cora all over again, allowing himself to be distracted, searching for a simple way that won’t destroy him or force him to completely unmake himself.

(He’s greedy and grasping, always reaching for _more_ when he should just hold onto what he _has_.)

Cora offered herself to him so easily; he barely had to do more than show up with a demonstration of power and she was leaning into him, baring her neck to him. And Rumplestiltskin (desperate, lonely, _weak_ man that he is) had immediately succumbed and fallen to her wiles.

But then had been Belle, full of light within where Cora had merely been lit from without, wise where Cora had been cunning, _good_ where Cora was not, brave where Cora was simply self-preserving, and by the time Rumplestiltskin made it through gentle laughter he didn’t understand and soft touches he couldn’t fathom and emotional connections he couldn’t comprehend, he was in too deep to get himself out.

But he had. He’d fought and clawed for composure, reached for anger and betrayal to bear him up, sought out cold disdain to bolster him (and become Belle’s Cora, ripping out his own heart to show her that her love meant less than nothing to him, because he’d known how much that hurt, didn’t he, and it was the fastest way to get the temptation of her presence far away from him).

He’d passed that test, though it took everything inside of him to do so (and left him hollow and bleeding out, endlessly weeping in some empty cavern of his heart).

Now August had come, tempting and implying and hinting and leading, and Rumplestiltskin (desperate and _wanting_ and still so weak) succumbed and fell for the trick.

Maybe, he lets himself hope, this means that when it is truly Bae before him, when it’s his _son_ looking back at him, he will pass that test too (but will Bae leave him at the end as Belle did?).

It’s a foolish hope, but it’s all he has to cling to now that even the visions of Baelfire have abandoned him. He sleeps and there is nothing. He wakes and pulls the cord on his last traps and snares and setups for the Queen and the Savior, but still there is nothing.

No Baelfire. (No Belle.)

Just him alone, still searching, still planning, still waiting.

(Still afraid that instead of passing this next test, he will fail all over again.)

And still the curse remains unbroken.

\---

He feels it, when Emma believes. It’s a tremble in his soul and a thrum in his bones and a long-held breath being released inside him. 

_Finally_.

He’s alone (no waiting Bae, no smiling Belle) when Emma comes to him with a broken mother at her elbow and staggered belief in her eyes and desperation dripping out of her. A nostalgic sword, a strategic _please_ , a final car ride where Rumplestiltskin throws away the last of his façade, and True Love (magic) is once more warm and beautiful and _useful_ in his hands (round and soft and bright where the dagger was sharp and hard and cold in the night).

His boy. Finally, _finally_ , for the first time in over three-hundred years, he is truly a part of the same world as his son. Moments away from the breaking of his curse, power (to find his son; to protect his son; to see his son again) instants from being reclaimed, and he could so easily be with his son ( _Bae_ ) in only a day or two.

Then…a voice. An accent he’ll never forget (even cursed and filled with fake memories, this voice haunted him, the cadence of words delivered through a smile). His mind playing tricks on him, sanity slipping away here at the finish line.

But…she’s there. _Here_. Right in front of him. So close he…he could touch her (if he dared).

It’s been so long since she came to him in his waking hours. Maybe she’s appeared now because he’s about to escape this newer, bigger prison cell. Maybe she’s here to encourage him, to reassure him that he _will_ find his son (she always made it so much easier for him to hope and to believe in good things), that everything will turn out for the man she always insisted on seeing (even without proof, without context, without hope) in him.

It’s another test. Of course it is. A portal opened and he failed his son (fathers always fail their children when portals are involved). Cora tempted him and he momentarily failed his son (he can never do anything _but_ fail him). August arrived to remind him of what he wants so badly and how much he must fight to reach that moment (and he betrayed his son with that moment in the woods, giving to another the words Baelfire deserves more than any other). But Belle…

Belle is the final test. The most dangerous. The most permanent. The hardest to overcome. Last time, when her eyes were so blue and her lips were so soft and her acceptance was so enveloping…he’d stayed the course. He kept true to his boy. The price was _so_ high, the highest he’s ever paid since he took on the Dark Curse to save Bae (and lost him anyway, a life for a life, a curse for a hope), but he did it. Turned (into Cora) his back on Belle for Baelfire’s sake.

Now, so close to the end of it all, of course she would come to see him again. Come to make sure he doesn’t back out, doesn’t let his cowardice get the better of him (again). And he won’t. He’ll stay focused. He won’t let go of his son (he _can’t_ ), not even for Belle.

But…she’s so beautiful. So small and bright and still so trusting as she makes her way into his lair where even the puppet boy trembled to be caught. 

Just one second, he tells himself. Just for one precious moment, he wants to savor this. To indulge in this last gift of the sight of her (her eyes are so much bluer, her hair so much darker, her mouth so much more inviting than he remembered). To pretend that he could ever possibly have both Belle _and_ Bae, the only two people who have ever truly loved him back (even if only temporarily). To imagine he could ever have a happy ending.

She’s speaking, saying things no vision of her ever has, something about Regina, about prison cells and protection. Rumplestiltskin looks his fill, draws nearer (so strange to be the one moving toward her rather than the other way around), drinks in every tiny detail—and touches her.

She doesn’t disappear.

Coarse fabric, soft arm, fragile bone, _warmth_.

And she’s still here. Doesn’t flicker into nothing. Doesn’t fade into thin air. Just stays, looks from his hand to his face (but doesn’t draw away). Confused (but not afraid). His beautiful Belle, never retreating, always trying to understand.

And real. _Alive_.

He falls into her, trips against reality and stumbles right into her dreamlike arms. Pulls her close and wraps her up in belief and hope and desperation (the most potent ingredients of any spell and enough, maybe, to keep her here a bit longer, a companion to stave off the loneliness until he can find his boy).

She doesn’t exactly catch him up with matching intensity (but then, of course she wouldn’t, not after she saw the beast inside him). She doesn’t know him, and that only makes sense, doesn’t it? He doesn’t know himself, so how can this beautiful mirage know anything more?

(But, oh, he wishes she did. Wishes she could tell him if he will really give up magic and power and the Dark One to keep his boy. Wishes she knew if he would falter here and give up all hope and hide away, close but removed from the son he never wants to hurt again.)

With Belle watching him, Rumplestiltskin feels much more secure. He already failed her so badly; he can’t disappoint her again. Besides, if he gives up on reaching Baelfire, then all his sacrifices will have been for nothing. Giving _her_ up will have been for nothing. Surely, if he can give up Belle, then he can certainly give up magic.

But not just yet. First, he has to find Bae—and if there’s anything he’s learned about this world, it’s just how big it is. Without magic, he could spend another three or four lifetimes just trying to track him down. His patience has all been used up getting to this world, so magic will take him the rest of the way. After all, time’s moving again. Everything counts now.

(His boy isn’t getting any younger.)

“Do I know you?” this vision of Belle asks, and Rumplestiltskin has to blink away tears and _wishing_. 

“No,” he says (he doesn’t know himself yet). “But you will.” (And so she shall. He was a beast, a monster, hidden in the guise of an almost-man; he’s a coward, a spinner, hidden in the costume of powerful wealth. But now, for the first time, he will show her the father who will never stop looking for his son.)

\---

It’s such a comfort to have Belle beside him. It feels right, to have her with him as he completes this last necessary step. He always thought he’d be alone here, but it’s not so bad a fate if he can dream up a Belle to keep him company (to help him believe there’s still a flicker of light left inside him). With her dogging his steps, he cannot help but move forward, ever closer to the moment where he stands face to face with his (real) son.

But then she calls for him to wait. He can’t. He can’t stop. He can’t think. He can’t do anything but play out these last few moments that he has planned for hundreds of years. The power of Lake Nostos will only be effective for a moment or two in the wake of the magic released by his curse breaking. He cannot let anything sway him from reaching the well before Emma Swan finally gets around to remembering what her son’s tried to tell her about fairy tales and gives in to the same power that birthed her and set her on the fast track to heroics.

“Rumplestiltskin…”

Power flickers around him. Lightning sings in his veins. Terror roots itself deep and thick and choking inside him.

“Wait.”

As surely as if she holds his dagger, Rumplestiltskin finds himself trapped in place. A test, a test, some part of his mind is screaming, and he’s failing it, allowing himself to be distracted. But he can’t help it. She’s so beautiful. So close. Still looking at him (not screaming), still stepping closer (not running away as fast as she can, free of their deal and whatever foolish notions convinced her to kiss him last time).

“I remember,” she says, and this is it. The repudiation. The condemnation. The door slamming on any happy ending besides that oh-so-slender hope of Bae’s eventual forgiveness.

But Belle. Wonderful, amazing, _magical_ Belle. She surprises him (as she always does, with words of defiance and chipped cups and laughter and touch and eyes that saw so clearly through all his masks and layers and mysteries). 

“I love you,” she says.

For an instant, Rumplestiltskin freezes. Shakes. Feels terror like he has never felt before (not standing before a seer’s cage; not on the deck of a pirate ship; not hanging over a portal while a shadow’s cold hands sank into his neck; not even standing atop the grave of his hopes while a stranger held his dagger). 

This…this isn’t a vision. It’s not a dream or a mirage or a spell or his own insanity. No imagined Belle of his has ever ( _would_ ever) repeat that sentiment that sent him into such a frightened rage.

Only Belle, the _real_ Belle, would ever dare offer her heart to him again.

“I love you,” she says ( _still_ , again, because, in spite of, he doesn’t _care_ ; he only knows he doesn’t deserve this).

Rumplestiltskin is not brave, but he is opportunistic (every peasant scratching to make a living and put food on the table for their loved ones is; he didn’t need the Dark One to teach him this), and he has never been so close to an opportunity like this one.

So he takes it (grasps at it with greedy hands and _hopes_ he doesn’t completely destroy her).

“Yes,” he gasps (aloud, aloud to a _real_ Belle). “Yes, and I love you too.”

His arms open (foolish, to show such vulnerability to one who has cause only to hate him), time stretches around them, spools of possibilities unwinding all around him (so many of them colored like bruises, broken hearts, lost hope)—and Belle collides into him. Steps into his arms (like she fell from a ladder), wraps hers around him (like he’s let another thief go free to be a father and fail his son), breathes against his neck ( _She died_ echoes and echoes and finally, finally, fades), slightly cool but pliable and here of her own choice ( _No one decides my fate but me_ , and the fate she chose isn’t a fall from a tower but a step into the monster’s heart), and if he wasn’t touching her from head to hips, Rumplestiltskin would be convinced this was just another illusion.

Only one thing mars its perfection. For so many years, the sight of Belle has always been accompanied by the feel of Bae. Now, with her in his arms, her face cradled in his palm (not flinching but pressing _closer_ ), it jars him not to see Bae somewhere nearby.

It’s torture, pulling away from her, turning from the temptation of her face tilted up toward his, lips parted, eyes inviting. But his _boy_ , his boy’s still out there, alone and abandoned and lost, so Rumplestiltskin does it. Pulls away and back to task.

But still, as magic returns, as power sinks into his bones, as he undergoes an inward transformation every bit as enlightening as that first one so long ago in a Frontlands forest—through it all, he holds onto Belle. A hand here, there, an arm tucked around her waist, a brush of his fingers across her arm. If this is to be a new world, then he shall keep what matters most closest of all. If he is to be transformed, he will hold on tight to that which will ground his spark of light amidst darkness. 

(And if she _isn’t_ real…if this is just a vision granted corporeality by his willpower, then he will bind her fast to his magic, will weave his power through her presence, will tether her irrevocably to him so that in some way, even though it be a mirage of Belle and a single cold conversation with Bae, he will have them both.)

“Magic is coming,” he tells Belle (or is it a warning? The last time he stayed alone in the woods to welcome magic, he emerged as a monster still cloaked in the self-deceiving mask of a father, so who knows what he shall emerge as this time).

“Why?” she asks, and for that, he cannot help but pull her closer, wrap his arm tighter around her. He _loves_ her. He loves her (and he will destroy her, he will poison her and taint her and corrupt her until she is either dark as Cora or long gone from his life, but for this little bit of time, she is his and bright and _here_ ), this girl with wise eyes and the will to always ask _why_ rather than just condemn him. Choosing understanding over scorn.

“Because magic,” he tells her, “is power.”

And there’s more to tell her. About a dagger and a curse and a boy who is worth the fate of worlds and times and curses. (About a coward and a spinner and a man who ran. About a beast and a curse and a plan centuries in the making and manipulations and monstrous deeds.)

But for now, she’s still standing next to him. For now, he is strong enough to protect her. For now, he can imagine Bae there with them, just out of sight.

And for this one moment (for this one old villain), everything is perfect.


	3. The Father

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait, but as consolation, this chapter alone is longer than the other two combined. What can I say, there's a lot to delve into with season 2! Hopefully, there are a few others still enjoying Rumplestiltskin fics as much as I do!

Belle doesn’t trust him anymore.

Belle trusts him far too much.

With power singing in his veins, with darkness reacquainting itself with the confines of his frame, with rage building like the rumbling of an impending earthquake through his soul, Belle looks at him and asks him to give it all up (it seems this theme from those he loves will never quite play itself out).

Rumplestiltskin looks at Belle, so brilliant, so lit from within, and he wishes he could let everything go to be here with her in this moment. But those blue eyes could so easily be turned blank and dead. That delicate throat could be crushed so very easily. That hair could turn dark and sodden with blood with no more than a thought and a snap of the fingers by any of the many, many people who would delight to find a weakness in the Dark One’s armor.

They’re all waking up, right now, right here. They will be confused, and then they will be angry, and though Regina will be their first target, it won’t take many of them very long to remember who taught the Evil Queen and stayed close to her side even when she seemingly had no more use to him.

They will come for him, and though magic is his again to command and wield (and he has a bit of a leg up in learning its varied use here in a new world), Belle is all too fragile. Too vulnerable. Too precious.

So he promises. He’s promised many things in his lifetime (and broken a fair few of them, though most not entirely on purpose), but this one tastes foulest in his mouth.

The nightmare is this: for all that Belle demanded a promise of him, delivered an ultimatum in her customary gentle manner, she nonetheless takes him at his word. Smiles and melts into him with no more than the flicker of an eye, trusting and naïve and so undeniably doomed to disappointment.

Rumplestiltskin tastes ash and loss and grief, but he swallows it back. It’s so easy to wrap his arms around this woman containing worlds within her, so wondrous to bend his head toward her and _know_ she will not flinch away—so cathartic and magical and _amazing_ to bring his mouth to hers, to drink in her gasp and her sigh, chasing back bitterness with this draught of beauty.

For just an instant, a suspended moment that stands out against all the untold decades of his life, Rumplestiltskin imagines that this kiss is wiping him clean: delving deep inside him, uprooting darkness and wickedness, righting the twisted wrongs inside his soul, clearing and illuminating until he is a mirror of Belle, everything she deserves and wants and imagines she sees when she looks at him. For just an instant, he pictures a happy ending where he is not the villain and Belle is not left heartbroken and disappointed.

But then the moment ends and rage rushes back into his bones and Belle closes her eyes to the reality of him as she rests her head against his shoulder (a weight as welcome as it is heavy, reminder of the head that once leaned against him, drowsy with sleep and bent with trust).

She loves him. She loves him, she loves him, she loves him (and all good things come to an end—but not just yet). 

Rumplestiltskin holds on tight, and vows that _this_ time, he will not be the first to let go.

\---

Belle slips her hand into his as they walk back to his car. She slides over the seat to sit right up against him as they drive back to the shop. She follows him inside with a smile and endearing shyness painted pink across her cheeks. Her eyes sparkle with joy and love, and Rumplestiltskin cannot help but wonder if he’s really _sure_ this is real.

How many times has he dreamed of a Belle returned to him? How often has he longed for just such a miracle as this?

Too often. Far too often to believe it now.

“Rumplestiltskin?” Belle lifts the curtain and sees him standing frozen, useless to her, as he wrestles with his hope (or is it just gullibility?), the wraith’s medallion wrapped in cloth and tucked out of sight. 

“Belle.” Rumplestiltskin looks down at the dress in his hands. “Here, something for you.” He’s never been smooth, but she’s so close, so _warm_ , that he adds, “It’s not as beautiful as you, but…”

She blushes, casts her eyes down, and then…then that smile. The twist of her lips, the corner of her mouth tucked in on itself, the way her eyes shine with fondness as she tilts her head to look up at him. 

So magical. So awe-inspiring. So perfect a reflection of his memories, as if plucked straight from them and given illusive form in the shadows of his shop.

It’s with terror that he sees his own hand rising (so much braver, so much more foolhardy, than the rest of him) to touch the pink curve of her cheek (to press that warmth and that fondness into his own skin). 

She doesn’t vanish (but then, now he has magic to aid in the sad wonderings of his lonely mind). Instead, she presses closer, smiles as wondering as if she thinks _him_ the miracle, and Rumplestiltskin doesn’t care _how_ she is here, only that she is.

\---

Even as a maybe-possibly-probably a delusion, she still leaves him. One contract followed to the letter, one tiny stone moved on the mountain of his rage, and out the door Belle flies. It makes him wonder about everything he thought he knew. Makes him see their history in a whole new light.

If he hadn’t made her promise _forever_ , how quickly would she have fled? Even if she still chose to come with him entirely of her own free will, how many days, _hours_ , would she actually have stayed before turning her back on him like everyone else? He never would have had a chance to attach any sentimentality to his chipped cup, perhaps, if she had whirled around and vanished at his first morbid quip.

The only reason she ever loved him enough to kiss him ( _True Love’s kiss_ , he reminds himself, no matter that it was meant to weaken and change him) was because she had no escape readily open. And once he freed her, well, then it only took a few measly hours for her to be gone _forever_ (hours and rage and a locked dungeon door and lies that tasted like bile in his mouth, but the point is, she _left_ and she didn’t come back). Now, returned to him so miraculously, it is mere hours again (these hours filled with kisses and kindness and shy, desperate touches, with a wraith and desperate souls and the deal-maker he must still be until Bae actually stands in arm’s reach) before she leaves with the slamming of the door and the lingering jangle of metal bells.

He’s alone again, just him and his wheel and his delusions, and when will it sink into his thick head (his black and shriveled heart) that villains don’t get happy endings?

Though maybe, if they are lucky enough to have Belle in their lives, maybe they can have happy possibilities?

Because she comes back. She cradles their cup like it matters. She touches him as if she isn’t afraid of him. She smiles and says she has to stay (and he’d prefer she _want_ to stay, but then again, maybe this _have to_ will keep her in place a little while longer before she once more flies free). She asks him, so shy and amused and bold all at once, if she can stay with him, and loops her hand over his elbow (as if arguments are merely passing things; as if her trust has not been damaged beyond all repair; as if being with him is where she _wants_ to be—or is it only where she _needs_ to be, still a hero, choosing to tame the beast rather than kill it?).

“Rumplestiltskin,” she says, and while most of him thrills to hear his name in her voice, there is a part of him (rooted deep and old and at the core of him) that tenses and stills, sure she is ending this now. Perhaps she came back to keep him from hurting anyone else and there will be no more kisses, no more lingering touches, no more fond smiles. Perhaps she isn’t real at all, just a mirage of a Belle come back to him after he betrayed her by showing her the beast she ignores. Perhaps she has never been real and he wept alone to empty air in the back of his shop before imagining a companion to walk with him to the well. Perhaps Belle is still long dead, her only eulogy that of scourges and flaying and high towers. 

“Can we…” She bites her lips (Rumplestiltskin’s fingers twitch with the urge to caress that pinch away). “Can we go home now?”

“H-home?” he stammers, weak and pitiful and everything he swore he’d never be again (yet, in some way, maybe because she might not be real, he doesn’t mind so much with Belle).

“You…you don’t live here, do you?” Casting her eyes over the tiny shop, he sees the moment she catches sight of the tiny bed crammed in the corner.

“No,” he says decisively before his beautiful mirage can look at him with pity (before she can see a reflection of that penniless spinner who scrabbled in the dirt and wept in the night). “You’re right. It’s been a long day, you must be exhausted. Let’s go…”

“Home,” she says for him, when his voice falters, and his heart flies to his throat at the feel of her hand slipping into his.

She stays close, as if she knows he doubts her reality and seeks to prove it to him in whatever way she can. Rumplestiltskin melts into her touch about as often as he flinches from it, drawn to it, afraid of it (once a coward…), but whenever she lets her hand drop from his or takes a step from him, his body seizes up in terror.

And she sees it.

Of course she does.

That’s the thing about Belle, he remembers. It’s her smile that he’s remembered most clearly (and her tears, and her anger, and the way she walked away to leave him alone in her cell). It’s her touch that he’s longed for above all else, dreamed of and hungered for, an impossibility so improbable as to be nothing more than a mere fantasy. 

But it’s her eyes that have always stuck him the sharpest. 

Looking. Seeing. Peeling away masks to reveal what lay beneath. _A mystery to uncover_ , she once said, but he’s not sure how much of a mystery he poses when she’s so easily able to peer beneath his showman guise and his defensive walls. Belle looks at him and _sees_ him, understands him in a way even Cora never did (in a way Bae was too young to, too close to), and for that, Rumplestiltskin both loves and fears her.

(As dreadful as the monster is, as inhuman as the creature is, it is the coward and failure beneath that he most dreads her uncovering.)

But then, if she truly does see him (the _real_ him, the him he’s forgotten how to be; or more likely, the him he’s never truly been, only aspired to be), then why does she follow him so trustingly to his house, smile so shyly when he leads her to a room ( _her_ room)?

“Are these curtains nailed shut too?” she asks as he digs her out a nightgown he pretends he just so coincidentally happens to have in her size (hope is a foolish, fickle addiction that has dogged him longer than the limp to his steps). 

“No, not quite. This world has a marvelous invention known as blinds. They might prove difficult even for your determination to let in the spring.”

She watches him closely, eyes so clear and bright and piercing, but still she laughs (softly, softly, never loud enough or mocking enough to prick his vulnerable insecurities) and brushes her hand over his. “We shall see,” she says, a promise and a threat and a warning and enough to tide him over while she’s separated from him by a closed door.

When she emerges, soft and open and displaying more skin than he’s ever seen from her before (shy and bold and determined and hesitant all at once), she takes his hand and leads him to her own bed. She pulls him down beside her, all bright eyes and warm hands and knobby knees that knock against his when she pulls him down beside her.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispers in the illuminated night ( _Don’t let me go_ , Bae whispers through the centuries), and Rumplestiltskin is powerless before her (so dangerous, so tempting, so _distracting_ , but none of that matters next to the lovely scent of her and the feel of her hair tickling his cheek and nose and the pliable weight of her draped half over him.

She knows him. Knows him in a way no one else does. Yet still she came back to him ( _twice_ ), she _chooses_ him, she _wants_ him beside her, and how can she possibly be real?

There are ways he could be sure. Ways he could test if this is a true miracle delivered to him or if she is merely the product of a broken mind. So many ways.

He uses none of them.

He _wants_ Belle here, and after the shepherd-king warns him that the town line is impassable (that Bae is still, once more and forever, barred to him), he _needs_ her. Needs her to hold his pieces together and glue the fractured shards of his heart in place so that he doesn’t simply vanish to dust. Real or not, she does all that, wraps her arms around him and _loves_ him.

And then, like every good mirage, she vanishes.

\---

All good things must come to an end, and in Rumplestiltskin’s case, it’s usually quickly due to his natural ineptitude hurrying things along. He’d known that one way or another he’d lose Belle and so he has. After yet another morning, another conversation where he is struck mute and silent (if she hasn’t seen the coward hiding inside the beast yet, then he certainly won’t be the one to bring him out into the open), he heads up to her room with an insufficient peace offering and finds her gone.

It hurts. He let go of Bae, but Belle left without even a word (without even the chance for him to hold on—but of course she did, of course, she sees him, she _knows_ him, so she knew he would let go because that’s what he always does, isn’t it?).

(She left him in broad daylight, when his back was turned, and if there is one thing Cora has over both Milah and Belle, it is that at least she waited for the dark of night to tell him to his face that he wasn’t enough for her.)

He only wants to make sure she’s all right (not too cold, not too lonely, not abandoned and regretting like Bae, like _him_ ; not captured and taken away by a pirate or some other enemy of his), but then he has to save her (and this is why he needs the power, why he can’t give it up, because without magic she’d be gone from him, forever and ever removed so that if she were to ever look at him with blue, blue eyes, she would see nothing worth taking a second look at), has to throw her father aside (the worthless man he should have hit just one more time, harder, more savagely, before the Savior showed up to interfere) in order to pull Belle back to safety.

And then she makes her choice. It was always hers to make, really, and he shouldn’t be surprised that she chooses what everyone else before her has. 

At least, he tells himself, she loved him for a while. That’s more than he deserves, really, and more than he ever thought to receive. For a few months in their old world, and a few weeks here, she loved him. 

For just a little while, he was someone that Belle could care for (someone who would _matter_ , someone that would cause _care_ should he live or die or fade away). For just a little while, he had a taste of happiness, and it will be enough, enough to tide him over until he can find his son and receive another (probably just as short) taste.

He’s always known that one way or another he’ll lose Belle, and so he does. He builds her freedom in his own way (another library, this time built of money rather than magic, both paid for by power, and funny how the very thing that gives her what she wants is something he can only obtain with what she claims to want him to give up) and offers her some bit of reparation (for her wasted time, for her misguided belief in him, for the bits of her he’s already tainted with his love).

A secret (the truth) doesn’t seem like enough, but it’s all she asked of him (the hardest thing he’s ever given another), so he dredges it up from somewhere deep and dark inside him.

“Bae,” he speaks aloud and it nearly rips him in two. Desperately, he tries to hide it, spills out more of the truth (the reason she can’t love him; not for any failing on her own part, but just because he is a coward and he’s known all along that cowards are even more impossible to love than monsters). 

Then he walks away (better to do so before she can). But how could he have forgotten?

_Belle_. 

He knew her so briefly, really, compared to the centuries he’s known Hook, the decades he’s known Cora, the lifetimes he’s known Regina (by Sight for most of it, but she’s not that complicated). When Belle came back (when he admitted the possibility that she might actually be _real_ ), he was so happy. So overjoyed and relieved and _furious_ and scared and delighted all at once. But buried in a corner he tried not to acknowledge, he wondered… What if she wasn’t as good, as pure, as beautiful as he remembered? He knows better than most how easy it is to build up something unseen until it rests on a high pedestal, forever out of reach of reality, always unobtainable. The Belle of his memories is wise and understanding and patient and friendly and always, _always_ reaching for him.

He wondered, deep down, if reality could stand up to such a long relationship with the ideal.

But then Belle.

She lived up to it when she woke up next to him that first morning and didn’t draw away by the light of day, safe now from darkness and desolation. Instead, she drew closer to him, tucked her head beneath his chin and draped her arm over him and stayed quiet while he reconciled himself to the reality of a Belle even better than his memories.

She lived up to it when she teased him over breakfast and rested her feet against his under the table. When she asked to look around and lit up at the sight of his library and sat down with a book when he said he had to go to the shop. She lived up to it when he staggered home with glass shards in his ankle and dusted in his hair, with tears in his eyes and frustrated anguish battering away inside him, Bae’s name locked up in his throat—she took one look at him and left her seat and her book and her tea to wrap him close and whisper reassurances into his ear.

And now she surpasses his rose-tinted memories again, because even when he tries to walk away from her, she offers him hope. Cracks open the curtains to allow him the suggestion of light, opens the doors on the possibility of more. 

But then, he knows what hope always leads to: more disappointment.

Not that it keeps him from grasping at everything she gives him, every stilted invitation, every under-flavored hamburger, every surprise picnic. He takes it all and is grateful (is ever more sure that she can’t actually be real, or if she is, she sees a delusion, a pretty mirage, sitting across from her just as almost surely as he does).

But if her desertion of his home does anything good, it is to remind him of what he’s been in danger of forgetting. To refocus his attention where it should have been all along.

The town line. Bae. His boy, out there somewhere, alone and lonely and _regretting_ , feeling so abandoned and unloved that even his ghost-form has faded away. 

No, Rumplestiltskin cannot let that stand. 

Belle isn’t a distraction (she’s so much more, so _much_ that completes him in ways he thought could never happen without Bae), but Cora is and this time, he doesn’t let her faze him. He has magic at his fingertips and a problem to solve and his boy waiting, so it’s simple enough to ensure a plan where Cora has no hope of surviving (his love for her was as pale as a distorted reflection in muddy waters, and mirrors and other worlds are no longer enough to contain her; he’s willing, now, to strike out at her himself). Of course it is Regina who ruins it all (not that Rumplestiltskin cares) and if he weren’t so angry with her, he’d admire her long-delayed crisis of character.

For sake of the man Belle wishes him to be, Rumplestiltskin pretends to be happy Emma and her mother are back, pretends to be sorry about what might have happened to them, but inwardly, he thinks they’d all be a lot safer if his plan had worked and it really _was_ Cora who’d tried to come crawling through the well’s portal. Death is the most final solution to any problem, and oftentimes the easiest as well.

“Any luck?” Belle asks him when he leaves his interrogation of Smee to meet her for a late dinner. 

“Not yet,” he replies. He wants to reach out and take her hand, clasp it close and let her know just how much it means to him that she asks. But she’s the one who’s left him, over and over again, so he waits. Not for long, of course. Just for a second, an instant, and then _she_ reaches out and places her own hand over his.

“You’ll figure it out,” she promises him. “I know you will.”

He’s subsisted centuries on an unwilling promise from yet another desperate soul trying to lure him into taking the burden of power onto himself, on an accidental hint dropped from the very creature who took his son away from him. He thinks he could easily subsist _millennia_ on this promise of Belle’s and the belief shining in her eyes, the warmth of her hand, the smile on her lips.

“Yes,” he murmurs, seal on a deal he only wishes he knew how to make.

But of course, it is never that easy.

\---

The one-handed pirate has a way of showing up in Rumplestiltskin’s life whenever he is closest to finding his son. He showed up long enough to steal away an all-too-willing Milah, then appeared just in time to steal the bean that could have taken Rumplestiltskin straight to Bae without all this rigmarole of world-destroying curses, and now, with the solution to the town line barrier in hand, the pirate appears again—and once more, he tries to steal away the woman in Rumplestiltskin’s life (only, this woman Rumplestiltskin is willing to do a lot more to save and keep close).

On a ship where once a coward trembled and shook with a sword at his feet, Rumplestiltskin confronts the pirate once again. He wishes he could say he’s braver this time, but terror surges through him, starting from the instant Archie bursts into the shop to tell him where Belle is (or earlier, even, when Belle’s call ended so abruptly, when Smee didn’t know where his captain was, when Belle came back into his life and with her, Rumplestiltskin suddenly had so much more to lose). The fear is so thick, so overwhelming, that Rumplestiltskin shudders beneath the onslaught and can only try to release some of it into the open.

Belle is watching, sweet and innocent and pure, _good_ , but Rumplestiltskin can’t stop the cane from swinging against flesh again and again and _again_ (from fighting for what is his in a way he never could before; Belle will never see him turn aside again—from now on, she will only ever see him fight for her). He strikes his past repetitively, savagely, endlessly. 

For the spinner who thought war would make him brave. For the wife who wished him dead. For the little boy who believed him when he said his mother was dead. For the pirate’s laughter and scorn, for the jeers in that tavern and the hot shame aboard this very ship, for the kick that knocked down an old beggar and the name of _Crocodile_ that Hook saw fit to give a penniless man so desperate as to beg for alms in the dark of the night from a crew of pirates. 

Terror can be alchemized into rage so easily, so smoothly that the transition itself lasts only the blink of an eye. 

Hook is every man who’s ever beaten him down, every woman who’s scorned him as a thing, every child who’s run and hidden from him, every magical being that could have saved Bae but chose _not_ to. Hook is his cowardice and his poverty, his darkness and his crimes, every night Bae cried himself to sleep and every day he had to wedge his own fragile shoulder under his papa’s arm to keep him upright.

(Hook is reminder of every reason that Rumplestiltskin doesn’t deserve Belle’s love.)

“There’s still good in you,” Belle says, and Rumplestiltskin wants to scoff. She’s delusional. Misguided at best, mad at worst. “I see it. I’ve always seen it.”

Rage courses through his veins (terror beats leaden in his bones), but Rumplestiltskin is suddenly struck motionless.

He thinks of blood-stained aprons and books vanished from her hands and an arrow he fully intended to strike through flesh and bone and organ. He thinks of tongues waved about like flags and quips about skinned children and slain innocents left in his wake. He thinks of dark spells and boiling potions and curses left lying around on scrolls Belle could easily read. He thinks (though he tries not to; he _always_ tries not to think of this) of a kiss turned into a battleground, of hands clenching arms hard enough to bruise and spittle flying in her face and a cell that must have scraped her knees when he threw her inside.

All of this, Belle has seen. Heard. Felt.

“I see it,” she says, and he cannot imagine how or when or where she could have seen anything but a monster. “I’ve always seen it,” she says, and he wonders what there was in the Dark One taunting her father and fiancé with the fate of everyone she ever knew to make her think there was anything behind the beast.

“Please,” she begs him. “Please show me I’m not wrong.”

Rumplestiltskin lets the pirate go (a mistake, he knows it even as he does it). He stands and takes Belle’s hand and lets her lead him from the ship he’d be happy never to see again. But all the time, her words echo in his head.

Because he knows: she _is_ wrong.

Belle has, it seems, never really seen him. With books as her companion, she looks at him and sees layers where there is only filth, mysteries where there is only darkness, goodness where there is only weakness. She’s created a picture of him, a guise of some tarnished knight in once-shining armor just waiting for a hand up and a polishing rag to become a hero once more. He can hardly fault her for it, not when even now he often reaches out just to check that she’s still corporeal. 

It hurts, though, because he well knows: all good things come to an end, and if her good thing is a delusion, it will end all the more quickly. 

Still, when she tells him that love’s worth fighting for, he cannot help but realize how long it’s been since she last walked away from him. He thinks on how many times Belle has come back to him when there is nothing requiring her to do so save her own choice. And he begins to wonder if Belle is even more magical than a cursed dagger.

\---

What good is magic against a single bullet? 

In only an instant, with the crack of a gunshot ringing in his ears and the glare of a neon-painted line shining in his eyes, Rumplestiltskin loses it all. It’s not the bullet that hurts, or the blood on her shoulder (though that burns, too, to see her hurt when he is literally _holding_ onto her), but the force of hatred propelling her forward.

He was merciful. He was compassionate. He was _good_ , and in return, he loses the only person who loves him. One enemy left alive (once, before he could fight, again when he could, and _again_ when he should have known better), and both Bae and Belle are taken from him in one fell swoop.

“Now you know what it feels like!” the pirate screams. Vengeful and wicked and so very, very foolish.

Rumplestiltskin thinks back to that spinner in threadbare clothes, leaning so heavily on a staff, begging for mercy he knew he wouldn’t receive. He thinks of jeers in a tavern and parting shots on the deck of a ship and derision that has never ended. He thinks of all these things, with Belle panting and trembling in his arms, quiescent as he lifts her back over the line (too late, too late), and wonders just what Hook thinks his life has been. Wonders that the pirate cannot see that if there is anything Rumplestiltskin is well-versed in, it is loss. It is regret. It is rage.

The fire is warm in his hands and the pirate’s death is seconds away when he is interrupted again. Like the cockroach he is, Hook survives, and survives again when Charming puts his hand on him and reminds him of Belle and helps him stand.

Belle. 

Belle who flinches from him. Belle who screams. Belle who shakes and cries and backs away from him and cries out _What are you?_ as if that bright, curious woman he loves never existed at all (or if she did, she never looked at the beast and saw a _who_ instead of a _what_ , asked _why_ instead of _how could you)_.

They pull him away, set up obstacles between, try to keep him back with ambulances and doctors and a hand reached out to hold him in place (why, why, _why_ do they only reach out when it is to restrain, to prevent, to stop; never to save, to help, to _care_ ), but it’s useless, all of it. He is bound to Belle, tied to her with magic stronger than the darkest curse ever made in any world. Where she goes, he must follow. He’s her anchor, her burden tying her down, the chains wrapped around her feet, and he cannot abandon her. 

There’s a lot he cannot do when it comes to her: he cannot break her curse (as she could have broken his). He cannot calm her or soothe her (as she has so often calmed and soothed him). He cannot just dissolve into nothingness and take with him all the ways his love has tainted her (as she once disappeared from his life, all her goodness wiped away in favor of darkness that’s so much easier, so much simpler, so much more welcoming to him).

It’s only when his lips burn from her scream and his heart shrivels away from that _What are you?_ and the cup lies in shards at his feet that he realizes it’s not abandonment if she wants nothing to do with him. ( _If you find something you love, you never stop fighting for it_ , but that’s only for the heroes, the good people, the ones who deserve the love they fight for; fighting for his has only brought more pain down on them.) 

The only gift he has left to give Belle is his absence.

And so he gives it to her.

\---

The visions are over, the delusions are gone, the mirage evaporated. _This_ is the reality. Belle is alive, then—finally, he can actually, really believe that. But she wants nothing to do with him. Worse, she actively wants him gone ( _Just go_ , she said, perhaps the last thing he will ever hear her say). Their days in his home, her library, their hamburger dates, the smiles she so unreservedly gave him, the touches she shared so freely. The open absolution in her eyes, the love in her kisses, the understanding in her hand on his.

All of it gone.

Ah, well. He knew it would happen eventually, one way or the other. He tried to fight for love, but Cora’s cold kiss and Belle’s echoing screams are proof enough that love isn’t in the cards for him. Better this way anyway, he tells himself (once, again, again, over and over until maybe one day he’ll actually start believing it). Belle’s still alive and she doesn’t remember him to nurse a broken heart, and his enemies all know better than to go after her to get to him (save Hook, who will die one day, very soon, any minute now, when he can just pick himself up off the ground and go find him to eviscerate him slowly and viciously). So, best just to let sleeping dogs lie.

“Besides,” Bae whispers to him, knelt beside him, fourteen and mischievous and a few weeks shy of giving up on him. “You know what _is_ in your future.”

“Bae,” Rumplestiltskin whispers by the light of a globe touched in blood.

Skyscrapers. An asphalt road. Red scarf. Blonde curls. And his _son_.

Real. Alive. Within reach. (Never saying _what_ , only _who_.)

So for once, Rumplestiltskin does the brave thing (though it terrifies him and leaves him shaking, trembling, a cripple hiding in a corner with blood on his hands) and walks away.

\---

He has dreamed this day countless times. Sitting alone looking out over a warm, vibrant world removed from him. Mixing potions and learning spells and writing curses. Manipulating lives and sifting through endless possible futures and weaving worlds like colored threads with hidden loopholes. Spinning at his wheel as if nothing had changed, as if he was still a powerless coward helpless to save his son, until he began to spin straw into gold just to trick himself into thinking things _were_ different (he _would_ be able to save his son). Dreams and imaginings and possibilities running through his mind until they all seemed more real than the lonely, twisted existence he lived out day after day. 

Everything he did, everything he endured, the crimes he committed and the darkness he embraced, it was all done while imagining _this_ moment.

When he stands in the same world, the same time, the same _room_ as his son. When he looks into someone’s eyes and sees Baelfire looking back. When he is close enough to reach out and hold on and this time never let go.

He’s played the scene out in his head millions of times, even got a dress rehearsal of it with the puppet boy. But for all that, he never quite imagined _this_. 

Terror so great it chokes him. A corner he can so easily fall back into. Choked apologies and craven pleas and desperate hopes clogging in his throat.

He only ever imagined victory and joy and grief, yes, but love enough to make up for it.

For all that came before, Rumplestiltskin stands in a room and looks into this man’s eyes (the boy with nimble feet and laughing smiles is gone, he cannot help but mourn), this stranger’s face, and sees his boy looking back at him, _seeing_ him (the guise of the coward spinner wrapped in the accoutrements of power and wealth, anchored to this world by a tattered shawl around his neck, proof of their shared past), and all his imaginings wither into dust and are spirited away by the cold, harsh world of reality.

(And it isn’t Rumplestiltskin keeping his son here, but another boy, another love, always others who are worthier than the failure of a father this man has already long given up on.)

“Clock’s ticking,” this stranger says, and all Rumplestiltskin can think of is the pirate, left behind in Storybrooke, battered and bleeding and _alive_ (alive to spill all Rumplestiltskin’s secrets to the boy who shouldn’t have to bear that burden of mothers and abandonment and murder and missed chances for beans that could have gotten him here sooner).

“I know I’ve made mistakes,” Rumplestiltskin says, “but you must believe me, I want to make up for it.”

No, no, no! He said that to the puppet, didn’t he? Something similar, and he can’t, he _can’t_ let Bae have a recycled apology. 

The truth, he reminds himself (that’s always what Belle wanted, and she was good and pure and perfect, just like Bae, so maybe that’s what this stranger wants too). 

“There’s no greater pain than regret,” he says.

His boy (his _boy_ , grown and bitter and not even able to look at him, and this is not what he thought the Sight was promising him) scoffs and shakes his head. “Try abandonment,” he says, and how can Rumplestiltskin do anything but flinch at that?

(There was a crater and a cyclone and a portal. A father and a son and clasped hands. Another world where the father can be better and the son won’t have to be disappointed over and over again. There was a choice and a moment where the two hands were no longer clasped and in both scenarios, it was the father who let go, and that’s the worst pain of all, because abandonment should never breed and repeat but here they are, and for this scenario, Rumplestiltskin has no example to follow, no precedent as guide, because _his_ father never came looking for him, only came to steal away the one good thing left in Rumplestiltskin’s life and poison the bond between them.)

“Please,” Rumplestiltskin says (all those centuries of power, all the magic he has acquired and learned and created, and all of it is gone to leave the cowardly beggar, the one Bae loved before he knew the uselessness of him). “Let me make it up to you.”

“How are you going to do that?” Bae asks (it’s not a rejection; Rumplestiltskin’s heart foolishly perks up). “I grew up alone. I grew up without a father. You can make up for that?”

“Yeah,” he says (imaginings and wishful thinking and desperate souls, all of it there in his face, on his tongue, cupped in the palm of his shaking hand). “Yes. I can.”

“Two minutes,” this stranger counts down.

Two minutes. Three centuries to get here and three minutes to say everything he needs to win his way back into his boy’s life. 

Abandonment. Regret. Pain. Loss. Betrayal. 

How can he make up for that? (How can he know _how_ , when no one’s ever tried to do the same for him?)

Two minutes. Seconds counting down and then he will have no son, no boy, no chance, no hope for anything but this.

(There was a portal and a father and a son. There was a world one of them wanted and a chance to be more and only one tiny thing holding him back. There was a deal and an opportunity and something one of them wanted more than anything in any world.)

“Come with me to Storybrooke,” Rumplestiltskin blurts. “There’s magic there. I can turn the clock back. Make you fourteen again. We can start over.”

(There was a father and a son and an offer made by a shadow that tipped the scales out of the son’s favor and into the father’s, and if history is to repeat itself in endless cycles, then maybe this is the key and surely, after everything he’s done, Rumplestiltskin can play the shadow’s part atop his own? This is, after all, the whole reason Lost Boys exist for, and Bae heard the music, didn’t he? He’s a Lost Boy and an abandoned child, and if nothing else, Rumplestiltskin can offer this one final gift.)

But this stranger ( _Baelfire_ ) draws back in disgust. In revulsion. (In something that looks, for just an instant, like genuine terror.) “Fourteen? I don’t want to be fourteen again! Are you…are you insane?”

(Of course. Of course. Bae isn’t Malcolm. Bae isn’t _him_.)

Truth. Truth. It’s all that made Belle give him another chance.

“I can’t make up for the lost time,” he admits (it scrapes against his throat like copper and salt and rust), “but I can take away the memories. Bae…”

“Take away who I am?” Bae says (and why is it that everything Rumplestiltskin tries to give him, tries to do for him, is turned into something horrible and despicable when Bae repeats it?). “No thanks. One minute.”

Everything is spiraling away from him. The room is too big, too small, not enough corners, nowhere to hide. For all that Bae can’t look at him, Rumplestiltskin’s skin itches with the perceived scrutiny, the disappointment. He wants to shrink into nothing, wants to transform into _something_ , wants to be anyone but who he is, small and worthless and all his clever words dancing out of reach, his silver tongue turned dull with rust. His hands shake as if he’s once more holding a heavy hammer over a fragile joint, and he is too slow, too little, too weak, too stupid, too _worthless_ to stop his boy from turning his back on him.

“Bae,” he says (it’s all he knows how to say when the world threatens to crush him, the talisman he has used to keep his hold on what little sanity he has left). “Please…give me a chance.” And then he speaks the one truth he has cradled close for eternities (the truth that has brought him here and holds him in place despite the overpowering urge to run): “You once loved me.”

“You were once a good man,” his boy says, and Rumplestiltskin feels the words like the fall of the gavel at the end of a trial. 

_You were once a good man._

But he wasn’t. He was never what his boy thought he was, and it turns out love is always conditional, never free, only provisional and temporary and all too fleeting.

Words spill from his mouth, seconds slipping away from him. “And I can be that man again,” he says (Belle told him he could, she believed it, though he’s not sure what moment they want him to go back to, maybe back to when _he_ was fourteen, abandoned and small and alone and unloved, dreaming of grand plans and big days to come and settling for just someone to smile at him and remember his name). “I’ve changed. Look, I came here, to this city, without magic.”

Too little too late. It’s written all over Bae’s face (and he should have ran, should have found a corner and waited to wither into dust, because then he would not have these words to haunt him for the next endless eternity.)

“Yeah, yeah, and you’re still trying to use it to make up for your mistakes. Still think that can make it all better. It won’t. It can’t,” he proclaims, so sure, so unforgiving, that Rumplestiltskin shrinks (inches withering away, floating toward light it can never touch). “You have no idea what I’ve lived with. You’re so worried about _you_. You know what I’ve dealt with?”

Rumplestiltskin wants to run. He wants to vanish in a puff of smoke and appear anywhere else, in the cell under Snow and Charming’s castle, still waiting for his curse to be cast, or even back in the Dark Castle just after he built it, still looking at centuries until this moment. (He wants hope back. He wants the possibility of something besides _this_.)

But he stays. (He will never let go again.)

“Every night,” Bae says, in that voice he once used to tell his papa of the nightmares he wanted to forget (back when his papa could still shoo those nightmares away), “for more years than you could know, the last thing I see before sleep is the image of you. You and me, over that pit. Your hand…wrapped around mine.”

Rumplestiltskin’s hand tightens over his cane. He can feel the little boy’s fingers clasping close to his. The warmth and the shape and weight and the _trust_ of it.

“And then,” his little boy says, “you open your grip.”

Truth. Only truth. 

This is the truth: Rumplestiltskin had a son who loved him, who refused to leave him, who was everything Rumplestiltskin’s own papa never was for him. And Rumplestiltskin let him go.

“And as I fall away,” this man tells him, “all I can see is your face. Choosing all…this… _crap_ over me.”

The hand gesture. The tilt of his head. His boy knew him. Saw him. Recognized him even though when he first emerged from that Frontlands forest he looked so different the soldiers mistook him for the old Dark One. But his son saw him and knew him and accepted him, loved him, wanted to save him. No matter how monstrous he’d been, Bae hadn’t turned his back on him ( _I would have chosen you!_ he’d cried at Rumplestiltskin when the piper’s music faded to uncomfortable silence between them). And Rumplestiltskin had let him go.

“Now it’s my turn,” says Baelfire. “Now I’m letting you go.”

He never said it, Rumplestiltskin realizes. He said it to the puppet, but he should have said it to Bae.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers—and reaches out, because he can’t help it (because it’s his last chance).

“I don’t care,” his son says (but he does, he’s bristling and closed down the way he used to get when he cared _too much_ ). “I didn’t get closure, so you don’t either. Got to go.”

“Oh, Bae—”

“No. Time’s up,” says Neal Cassidy, and he walks away. 

_Try abandonment_ , he said, and oh, Rumplestiltskin has, hasn’t he. Abandonment, loss, regret, all of it painful and debilitating but all the more so because he deserves it, doesn’t he? Never enough to earn a father’s love, win a mother’s heart, keep his aunts alive, satisfy Milah, appease Cora’s lust, or save beautiful, innocent Belle. And certainly not enough (how could he have ever thought he would be?) to fix what he broke between him and the one absolutely good thing in his life.

Three hundred years in a quest to find his son and tell him he’s sorry and that he loves him.

Three hundred years and he failed.

(Because in the middle of everything else, he forgot to say the thing that mattered most. 

He didn’t tell Bae that he loves him.)

And now his time’s up (and immortality is his unending sentence).

\---

There are a thousand ways to kill someone (he should know; he’s used a fair few of them), but this is a new way that threatens to completely unmake him: pricked by a thousand, thousand invisible cuts with each slight Bae gives him, each sideways glare, open implied reminder, small avoidance, proof that he no longer has a papa. They sting and bleed and hurt, but how can Rumplestiltskin complain when this is exactly what he deserves (actually more than that, because for now, he still gets to see Bae, study the man and find the boy inside, look for the boy and find the man he’s become)? 

A boy brought him to his son and a boy will unmake him, and if he weren’t so attached to the nasty habit he has of self-preservation, Rumplestiltskin’s pretty sure he might just ask Henry to hurry things along. Belle doesn’t need him anymore and Bae’s disavowed him. It seems he’s lived his life out to its inevitable conclusion and this anguished lingering accomplishes nothing more than dragging out his pain.

In the end, it almost makes Rumplestiltskin laugh, that it is Hook of all people who grants him the mercy of a quicker death. All his talk of vengeance, but nothing is ever enough—Milah and Bae and Belle, but now he missteps and actually gives Rumplestiltskin a gift.

Rumplestiltskin almost doesn’t even feel the hook embedded in his chest. He’s felt it before, anyway, back with Milah’s heart still dusting the palm of his hand and what he thought was a bean in his other hand (or did he? maybe he was just a coward then too, _letting_ Hook trick him so he didn’t actually have to brave a world without magic; after all, if a father can let go once, who’s to say he cannot do it again?). It’s easy to let himself sag back against bars at his back (a prison cell, here, but at least it’s not a corner; he’d far rather die a monster than a coward). Easy to succumb to the poison racing through his bloodstream. Easy to imagine that this is where his story ends.

But then Bae. 

He’s there, just in front of him. Bae. His _son_. Staring and staring, _looking_ at him, reaching out to him with steadying hands, eyes so wide and innocent and far too compassionate to ever be a soldier’s (and Rumplestiltskin _saved_ him from that, from that battlefield beneath a red sky, the one good thing he’s ever done in his life). 

“Papa,” he says, and a bolt of lightning sears through Rumplestiltskin’s soul.

_Papa_. His _son_ is calling him, _needs_ him (maybe, maybe, _maybe_ even wants him). 

He’s still a papa, which means there’s still hope. There’s still a chance.

His quest isn’t over yet.

\---

The next day is mostly a blur to Rumplestiltskin. Only a few highlights remain at the end (the most important things). One, his son can pilot a ship and seems to be quite familiar with the _Jolly Roger_ , which means Hook deserves to die for more reasons than Rumplestiltskin even knew. Two, the Charmings for all their idealism and adventures are rather useless and he will never trust them again, family or not (but it was good, for his son to see Rumplestiltskin trust in the idea of family, and good for Bae to remember that Rumplestiltskin is his papa). Three, Emma’s magic may be vast and promising, but she herself is a slow learner and to teach her, he’ll need every year his immortality grants him and perhaps more. And four, the rage he’s sensed in Snow White for decades, the wrath simmering away beneath her carefully constructed mask of goodness, is closer to the surface than ever before. (There’s a reason, he thinks, that Regina was able to frame her so easily of murder, and a reason David Nolan believed she could be capable of it.)

What Rumplestiltskin mostly remembers about his time spent dying in a tiny bed in a small room in a town he created is the fact that Bae fought to save him. The Charmings, Emma, anyone else who helped in any way, they were all there to prevent Cora from becoming the Dark One. He has no illusions as to how much they care about him.

But Bae? Bae was there to save his father. He came back to a place with magic, picked up a sword and stood in front of two witches, let magic touch him again in a way he ran from before, sat in a besieged shop next to the man he feels so much anger for…and all to save Rumplestiltskin’s life.

Rumplestiltskin would endure another hundred decades in a cursed town, would wait a thousand more years, just to have these moments again (to know that for all the rage and the blame and the resentment, Baelfire still loves him).

It is a boy who will unmake him, and a boy who led Emma to Storybrooke and Rumplestiltskin to Baelfire and all of them to the place where Hook waited to shove a sharp end in Rumplestiltskin’s chest, and for all Snow’s wrath, she is often tempered by Charming’s compassion, so Rumplestiltskin isn’t entirely confident that these _aren’t_ the moments of his unmaking.

_Three minutes_ , his boy says inside his head. Three minutes to live, and if these are the last, he can’t fail Belle the way he did Bae.

It’s harder, to open up to a phone with other people nearby, but somewhat easier to know that he doesn’t have to look into Belle’s empty, scared eyes as he tries to come up with words worthy of her. _You’re so worried about you_ , Neal told him, so Rumplestiltskin doesn’t talk about himself. He thinks of the woman he loves, so bold and confident and sure in herself and eager to make her own choices even if they don’t turn out well. He thinks of the woman who reached out to him, to ask him _why_ and to hold his hand and to hug him close, to kiss him and try to save him in the only way she knew how. He thinks of the hero who could have saved whole worlds but chose instead to save _him_. 

“I’m sorry, Belle,” he manages before his strength gives out and the phone falls away. 

_I love you. I’m sorry._

The two most important things, and he said them both.

And now Bae.

Baelfire, his strong, brave, _forgiving_ son.

“Didn’t know you had that in you,” Bae mumbles to his chest. Rumplestiltskin doesn’t have the energy to open his eyes, but even if he did, he thinks he would leave them shut (better to imagine the best than see the worst; better to reach for the reality of his son than drown in the illusory images of his little boy at his knee).

“Oh, I’m full of love,” he says.

He shouldn’t. If he had lifetimes to live, he wouldn’t (and maybe that makes him a coward or maybe it just makes him wise, he doesn’t care anymore). But his time is dwindling ( _Clock’s ticking_ , Bae said), and he can’t go without fulfilling his quest.

“I’ve spent a lifetime looking for you,” he says, but this isn’t about him. It can’t be. It’s for Bae, all for Bae. “For a chance to say I love you. And I’m sorry.”

_I love you. I’m sorry._

That’s all he should have said, back in that apartment in Manhattan. He should have just looked at his boy and said, “I love you. I’m sorry.” And then they could have spent the remaining two and a half minutes hugging.

(But he’s always been a slow learner, hasn’t he?)

For the first time, it’s not Bae peeking through from behind the shield of Neal Cassidy. For the first time, it’s just Bae, chin ducked against his chest, hands fiddling with each other, his voice just a mutter as he says, “I didn’t think you would go back on our deal.”

The deal. The one deal Rumplestiltskin broke. The one that mattered most. The one deal that was made just for _his_ benefit, with his well-being that Bae was concerned about, and the one that’s haunted him all this time.

Bae trusted him. And Rumplestiltskin let him down.

“I just made the wrong choice,” he finally gets out (the words he’s never let himself think, the plea he wanted to hurl at the Blue Fairy and whoever else dared to judge him: he just made the wrong choice in an instant and has paid for it for centuries). 

And then, because he is Rumplestiltskin and he always wants more (because his seconds are ticking down and this is his last chance), he reaches out. Holds his hand between them. 

“May I?” he whispers.

Two hands, clasped, father and son. A moment that formed the foundations of his life and a moment that ripped them to shreds and left him in ruins.

“I’m still angry,” Bae says, because he always gives him the truth.

“I know,” Rumplestiltskin says. But he doesn’t let his hand drop.

And then…

And then Bae turns, falls into him, pulls him close, holds on, wraps his hands around Rumplestiltskin, so tight, so secure that even if Rumplestiltskin is weak and unsteady (and foolish again), it wouldn’t matter. 

His son’s hand in his. Another moment to remake him, to send him into death or to tide him over for long lonely years to come. 

It doesn’t matter. 

It’s his son, and a hand clasped in his, and whether this is a delusion brought on by dreamshade poisoning or not, it doesn’t matter.

Rumplestiltskin has learned this lesson: he holds on and doesn’t let go.

\---

Cora broke him in ways he’s never fully admitted, but even she doesn’t deserve the Dark Curse. She used him and manipulated him, bested him and fought him, turned against him and then condescended to him as if he didn’t teach her all the magic she knows, but even she doesn’t deserve to die without having a chance to say the words that freed him only moments ago. 

“Did you ever love me?” he asks.

Whatever her answer, he doesn’t know that it matters. She still threw him aside, still chose power over him (but he can forgive her that if only Bae will forgive him for the same thing), and ever since Belle, he thinks that _he_ probably didn’t really love Cora.

Still, he spares a wish that she will tell Regina, just once before the end, what he’s just told Bae. 

Standing over Cora’s body, his dagger safe in hand and Bae safe and alive in the woods (Cora was many things, but she was seldom stupid), Rumplestiltskin looks down at Regina and for the first time, he cares (he _lets_ himself care).

(He tries to warn her, but this truly is too little too late and though he hesitates to cut ties with her, _I did nothing_ , he doesn’t blame her for turning on him.)

\---

When he is healed, when Bae clatters back into the shop breathless and waving a sword with more skill than his fourteen year old self ever had when wielding convenient sticks, when they stand face to face for the first time (Rumplestiltskin not obscured by a world with no magic and Bae not clouded by residual affection and a hero’s concern for life), it is as if that moment Rumplestiltskin clings to so tightly never happened. Or rather, perhaps it did happen, hand clasping hand, but it is too close a scene, a feeling, to another time when their hands clasped (a time when Rumplestiltskin did _not_ hold on), and the one far supersedes the other, overshadowing it, dwarfing it.

“You’re okay,” Bae says, almost flatly ( _I wish you’d fought_ , Milah said when they all knew she meant _I wish you’d died_ ).

“Bae,” Rumplestiltskin begins (he spent lifetimes finding Bae; he will gladly spend lifetimes more apologizing to him, all in hope of another moment like the one dwindling into the past).

But Bae flinches and sets his jaw (so stubborn, so resilient, so much a picture of Milah in the way the sun is a picture of a candle) and walks away.

Rumplestiltskin stands alone save for the vision of Bae flickering at his elbow, young and innocent and still willing to lean against his papa.

\---

A rose on a coffin. It’s more than he spared for Cora when he thought a mirror was her final resting place (a world to rule and a throne that was hers, but he should have known she’d never be content with it; exile is still exile, after all), and it seems at once like too much and not nearly enough. She gave him acceptance and care if not love, drew near where others draw away, understood the fury and the bloodlust inside him, but in the end, she was hollowed out by power and let her child pay the price of her power (not as the wrong choice in an instant, but as a lifetime of bad choices she deemed good).

Regina spits and snarls at him, but he knows she’s glad he’s there. (Regina fears being alone more than all other fates, and since he can relate, since he is partly responsible for the coffin in front of them, he’s willing to endure her vitriol.) He’ll never be her father (he has a son already, anyway, and _father_ is apparently not the best color on him), but he’s been her teacher for half her life, so he does his best to help ease her through her anger.

It does him no good, of course, as he knew it wouldn’t. Some lessons you have to learn on your own.

“You want vengeance?” he says. “Henry’s the price you’ll pay.”

She doesn’t listen. She never listens to begin with, but Regina’s a lot smarter than she lets herself act most times, and eventually, she’ll realize the path she’s on.

He only hopes it isn’t too late for her (like it is for him).

\---

He’s had his moment, his mark of grace, Rumplestiltskin tells himself. More than he ever realistically thought could be his. Bae has allowed him to hold his hands, has pressed close and leaned his weight against him as he once did (in a harsher, simpler world). More, so much more, than Rumplestiltskin deserves. Though he wants more (as he always does), he forces himself to think of the long centuries of this quest, the endless years plotting and acting, the decades of monstrous deeds and the months lost in a haze of madness. He thinks of Cora and Regina, of Belle and chipped cups and empty libraries. He thinks of all that and remembers the tickle of Bae’s hair against his brow and the warmth of his tears trickling into Rumplestiltskin’s palm.

It was all worth it. Everything he did, everything he became, everything he gave up—all of it was worth it for that moment.

So Rumplestiltskin doesn’t press. Doesn’t demand anything more than Bae has already given him. Does not push or beg for just one more moment.

He came. He saw. He apologized. He touched. He made sure Bae knows he’s loved. It’s enough.

For now.

But Rumplestiltskin has endured the weight of immortality and the price of magic and the temptation of total darkness through virtue of one simple thing: extreme dedication to a single cause. If he were to lose that now… Well, he has a feeling the town might not survive either his boredom or his flailing for some new purpose to ground and focus him.

(Besides, he thinks in some buried part of himself crushed deep, deep down and buried beneath thoughts of acceptance and grace and resignation, if he _is_ ever to have more moments with Bae, he cannot allow himself to fall back into weakness and wickedness.)

Bae needs time to learn how to himself be a father (and he’ll be a great one, Rumplestiltskin knows, so clever and devoted and _good_ ; he would never let go of his own son), but there is another who needs Rumplestiltskin.

(Strange, so strange and unlikely, to have _two_ people who need him, who might again want him one day, who have loved him. Rumplestiltskin is thrown off-balance having to stretch his world to encompass _two_ people to love).

She cried, when he told her who she is, and she is, for some reason he can’t quite figure out (but that makes him want to yank the Charmings out to answer for their care of her), still in the hospital, and she has no one else (even her worthless father hasn’t bothered to go see her though she’s now exactly what he wished for when he paid Gold’s money to a rat to take her and steal all her choices from her).

(Besides, he thinks in some hidden part of himself biding time just beneath a layer of acceptance and resignation, if he is to be a better man, if he is to be the good man Bae once loved, then there is only one person who’s ever made him be more than the coward or the Dark One.)

A few days to pay back his debt to Snow for the vengeance she unleashed and now regrets (vengeance always brings regret, but the trick of it is that no one ever believes that until it’s too late). A few days to watch his son from afar, to study the boy who is his grandson who is his undoing. A few days to set up wards and protection spells in case anyone has the bright idea of going after the son of the Dark One; to install blood magic everywhere where Bae might need to go, to flee, to hide, to retreat (but Bae never will, because he’s not a coward like his father); and to hide the dagger again (nowhere seems good enough without Belle there to talk it over with and give him ideas and plant false clues and draw useless maps). Then another day just to gather up his pitiful scraps of courage, to shore up his defenses (in case she recoils again, looks at him like she finally sees the monster, asks him _what_ he is). 

And then he goes to see Belle.

And she _is_ Belle. Even with no memories, reset to a blank zero as if the curse has just been cast, she’s caring enough to be happy he’s alive (he should have told her earlier, but how could he know she cared?). Kind enough to listen (he should have tried to explain earlier, but how could he know that even his greatest curse could not take away from what makes Belle _Belle_?). Curious enough to ask questions (he should have offered answers earlier, played on her curiosity, but how could he have known that the sound of their cup shattering _didn’t_ mean the end of them?). 

She’s _Belle_. So pure and compassionate and brilliant, and her eyes are clear and insightful as ever, looking at him, _seeing_ him, reaching out to him. Her hand falls over his (like it did in a library created just for her), and Rumplestiltskin never thought this could be his.

“She’ll help you, Papa,” little Bae says from his perch on her bed. 

Yes. She’ll help him be the man who can break her curse with a kiss (the man Bae wants as father) and he will risk her fear and her hatred by reminding her of all she’s forgotten.

\---

But how could he have dared to hope?

(Why is he always so stupid, always making the same mistakes over and over again?)

He comes back with her freedom clutched in his hand (release papers the nurse was oddly reluctant to hand over) and she’s gone.

He finds her again (in a bar rather than his shop, with disinterest rather than fear in her cloudy eyes, and he’s surprised at how much more deeply the apathy cuts than the terror) and she’s not the Belle he once knew.

(His life is a circle, a loop, endlessly chasing and overtaking itself.)

The man disappears to be replaced with the beast, all teeth and claws and hatred when he confronts Regina, striding into her den with fire in his eyes and terror in his shaking hands. He should kill her (the last time he left an enemy alive, Belle was turned into this husk; the time before that, Cora survived long enough to find his dagger, the first ever to take it by force and hold the power over his life and will and future). He _wants_ to kill Regina, to strip the flesh from her bones and tear the magic from her veins and twist her heart apart cell by cell.

Instead, he does nothing. He sits across from her, drained and useless, all bark and no bite, smoke rather than flames curling from the jaws of this old dragon.

Regina smirks, smug in her victory ( _You’re Henry’s grandfather?_ , such a short conversation to evoke such a terrible response), but Rumplestiltskin lets her live. It’s not because he doesn’t think she deserves death (she does, she does, a thousand times over, she does; she deserves it nearly as much as he does). It’s not even because of the promise he made (and broke) to the Belle who disappeared on a barren stretch of road. No, he lets her live for a much worse reason.

He doesn’t deserve Belle (he never has; he never will), but he does deserve Regina (she could have been his; she could have been loved; she could have had a father who would protect her; she could have been a part of Henry’s blood family, too, so she wouldn’t have to feel so threatened or strike out at the innocent Belle for such a petty reason as envy).

(He took her childhood away from her long before she was even conceived, and then he took her mother from her just when there was a chance for a few happy moments, and he cares. Oh, how he cares.)

Besides, in some strange way Regina probably doesn’t realize herself (unless she’s thought of how Cora’s transformation was blamed on her association with him rather than her deciding to pluck her own heart like a ripe apple), she’s saving Belle from him. In all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons, but twice now she’s ensured that Belle is protected from Rumplestiltskin’s true nature, has set a buffer between Belle and the beast. Maybe, in some way, it’s better this way.

Outside the dingy bar, staring in through the windows at this woman who wears Belle’s face, Rumplestiltskin feels madness threaten to overtake him (and this time Mr. Gold teeters on the edge with him, lost with the absence of the dreams he lived for). Desperately, helplessly, Rumplestiltskin scrabbles for control (Bae is here, in town, able to _see_ any rash actions Rumplestiltskin might take, and he is not so forgiving now as he once was). 

He needs hope, _help_ , if he doesn’t want to lose himself to the madness that whispers inside him and dogs his footsteps.

“Be brave, Papa,” little Bae says, but doesn’t he know that that’s something Rumplestiltskin’s never been able to accomplish?

With no other options and insanity as the alternative, Rumplestiltskin swallows his pride and asks the prince for help.

\---

Charming has always been direct, almost simple, his presence very nearly a comfort in its quietude. Amidst endless possibilities, tangled potentials, and countless what-ifs, the prince is a single arrow on a fixed course. Rumplestiltskin needs that now, that clarity, that near-purity of thought. The clean marriage of action and thought.

Or perhaps it’s simpler than that and this is just more fear. After all, Rumplestiltskin hasn’t wooed since the ogres first found their way to the Enchanted Forest, hasn’t seduced since before Regina was more than a thought, and for all the advice in the world, he stumbled into Belle’s heart by complete accident, with no map to lead him back now that he’s so summarily been cast out. More than Charming’s impetus, he needs an example of how it is done, to fix his eyes on a single woman and find an (honest) way into her affections.

Though it seems, for all he tries (and he does try, perhaps in penance for losing the dagger he promised to protect; perhaps simply because the shepherd prince cannot forget that single conversation in the Infinite Forest), that not even Charming can help him now.

The curse is designed to target a person’s strength and then invert it into weakness. Like magic demanding a price, his curse demanded a consequence of virtue. The shepherd prince’s faith and resulting decisiveness transformed into a blanketing uncertainty that led to fixed indecisiveness. Snow’s strength of will transformed from compassionate leadership to fogged stubbornness. 

Cause and effect. Strength and consequence.

In all those interminable months waiting for the Savior to believe (so long that he’d almost believe Emma touched by his curse too, for as long as it took her, her fixed purpose constantly lost due to swaying distractions), he’d occasionally let himself think on Belle, alive, there in Storybrooke with the rest of them. He’d allowed himself to ponder, on rare nights, what the curse would choose to twist in her. He’d imagine ways he could have reached past the curse’s effects to court her anyway.

Her mind, he thought often. The curse would take her quick intelligence and her eager curiosity and her penchant for asking _who_ and _why_ and _how_. It would turn her slow, questioning herself rather than others.

Or perhaps, he’d think other times, her bravery. The curse would make her timid and quivering (too afraid to speak to a monster) or perhaps it would turn her reckless and impetuous with no fear at all (too quickly burning for a staid pawnbroker to keep up with her).

He should have known, though. Of course. Of _course_ it would take, of all things, her strongest virtue: her goodness.

She ( _Lacey_ , this new twisted caricature) is bright and clever, constantly asking questions, taking chances as easily as she gives them, eager to understand. She is bold and daring, unafraid to find the monster’s eye set on her, willing to tackle any challenge (any mystery) set before her.

But she is jaded. Cynical. Her eyes gleam not with compassion but with bloodlust (like Cora). She gives him pretty words and attentive queries while her eyes slide away to other men (like Milah). She doesn’t tremble at his touch, at his wrath, drawn to him anyway (like Belle, but _not_ like her at the same time).

She laughs at his cruelty and speaks Belle’s words to invite the shadows closer and stares, beguiled and beguiling, at the Dark One unleashed.

The perfect culmination of every woman he has ever cared for, this new Belle, this twisted Lacey, is a cipher (and he loves mysteries as much as Belle once did), a torment (and he is a man drawn to self-flagellation in a way only a coward can be), and a temptation (because he didn’t deserve that mark of grace with his son’s hands in his so this must be the price of it).

(He is lost, he is lost, he thinks as madness closes in around him. Bae is his past and Belle is gone and now there is only another, different father-and-son far in the distance while Lacey takes her place at his side, and these replacements are not anchor enough to keep him from succumbing to his weakness.)

He’ll fix her. A new goal. A new endgame. Pieces to play (Dr. Whale who owes him for the promise of protection he made and the way it was broken with a nurse and injections), a new part to learn and embody, a new (old) reputation to live up (down) to, all with the end goal of winning Belle back from this hollow shell.

In a way, he’s terrified to leave Lacey at all (lest her roving eye wander; lest the pirate come back for another go at revenge; lest she transform into something even further from the Belle he so desperately wants back). And yet, he’s petrified of staying too close for too long (afraid of what he might allow himself to become with her as his dark mistress, more seductive than Cora ever was, sweetness mingled with poison, softness masking a sharp blade). He cannot abandon her (he already did that and paid with her death that wasn’t but might as well have been) and he is loathe to be alone with her (to have Belle’s memories mingled and suborned beneath this inferior replacement).

He monopolizes her days and nights, but slips away for hours to watch from afar the man who was once a boy, the father who was once a son, Neal who was once Baelfire.

Rumplestiltskin cannot be trusted near him, of course. Not now that he is accompanied by Lacey rather than Belle (not now that he possesses one perfect memory he daren’t allow to be tarnished). And especially not since Henry is almost always with him. There’s a woman, too, one Neal has chosen to wed (and Rumplestiltskin burns with the desire to investigate and make safe, but his son’s always been so much better at winning allies and finding friends than Rumplestiltskin, and how could anyone help but to love Bae?), and the woman Neal watches with soft memories and sharp fondness in his face (the Savior and oh, look at the clever, twisted ways magic exacts payment even in this world free of it). But above all, there is Henry, and Rumplestiltskin has already proved himself flawed beyond redemption (already the darkness screams for blood), so it’s safer for all if Rumplestiltskin stay far, far away.

Better to watch from afar (better to keep the taint of Peter Pan locked inside him so it cannot mar what is precious and irreplaceable).

So after satisfying himself with brief glimpses, visual reassurances, Rumplestiltskin slips away, back to Lacey, to the claustrophobic confines of her presence, steeped in liquor and references he doesn’t understand. The differences in her from Belle that threaten to drown him and the similarities that catch his breath away every time he sees Belle peek from behind the mask. The suffocating lure of her sharp smile and the dark impulses she lures him toward.

“She’s not me,” Belle says, quiet and demure and eyes glinting teasingly. Her blue skirts swirl around her legs as she wanders through his shop, looking over the items she was always so curious about (Lacey doesn’t ask about the items, only about what they’re worth, what he did to acquire them). “She’s just Regina’s bitter imaginings of what Cora was like with you.”

“She is you,” he whispers. His hands shake as he tries to pour a drink for Lacey, awaiting him in the front of the shop. “Maybe darker. Maybe colder. Harder. But _you_.”

“No. No, she’s not.” Belle stands up straight and stares right at him, resolute and unflinching. “You just don’t think you deserve a better version than this. And you’re going to regret that.”

“Gold?” Lacey peeks through the curtain and Belle vanishes into the sunbeams dancing past closed blinds. “What’s taking so long?”

“Nothing at all,” he replies and forces a smile.

(Belle’s right: he’s not waiting, because this is all he will ever have.)

\---

Neal sees him at his worst (a worst unveiled for Lacey, to keep her eyes from wandering to Keith or to Hook or to any of the other hundred unsavories out there), and for all that he wraps his arms around Rumplestiltskin, it is only to restrain, not embrace. 

Truth, truth, truth, that is all he can offer (it’s all Belle talked about, really, and if she were here instead of Lacey, she wouldn’t walk away, would only reassure and advise and _help_ ). But Neal, this man so far from Bae’s wide-eyed wonder of the world, doesn’t want truth. He clings to this woman from a magicless world and keeps his distance from the woman he loves, and for all Rumplestiltskin admires his son, perhaps this is proof enough that he has inherited _something_ from his papa.

“You know, you haven’t changed one bit,” Bae tells him (there’s a familiar look of disappointment in his eyes). “For a second, I thought you might have. I started to think maybe you were worth my time. I guess I was wrong.”

“He is wrong,” little Bae says from his place at Rumplestiltskin’s elbow. “You’ve always been this way. Even when you were my papa, you were never a good man.”

“And yet,” Rumplestiltskin can’t help but say, “you’re still here.”

“For Henry. Not you.”

He should have stayed away, Rumplestiltskin thinks, bitter and savage (and _hurt_ ). He should have clung to that memory of clasped hands and salty tears and a soft _Papa_. He should have given up while he was still ahead.

“But that’s not you,” Bae says, so soft and honest and wounding. “And you haven’t changed.”

\---

Like the coward he is, he flees back to his shop. To Lacey. To a place and a person who doesn’t demand impossible things from him. The Charmings might interrupt, Regina might have found more trouble as always, but Rumplestiltskin, for the first time, finds that he truly cares as little as they all believe him capable of. He sends them on their way as quickly as possible, all debts now paid up and favors cashed in, and begins to think of maybe just getting in a car and leaving this place forever (but Bae is here and magic isn’t out there and it will never be more than an idle imagining).

“So it’s true,” Lacey says from behind him. “You really can do magic.”

And he hates the Charmings for this. Hates himself for it. Hates Lacey for listening. Because she says it like vindication and he’s reminded that she _is_ the kind woman who sat in a hospital bed and asked for truth and offered help.

She’s Belle. Still. Despite. Always. She’s beautiful and she’s drawn to him and she fits in his arms as easily as Belle and reaches to kiss him like Belle did and pouts when he draws away as if she wants him as close as Belle once used to, and this is what makes it so easy to fall for this siren’s deception. Perhaps she craves immortality and lusts for power and encourages him to kill whatever stands in his way—but it is Belle’s face that flickers with hurt when he steps away. Belle’s eyes that dim when he shuts her out or sends her away. Belle’s heart that seems to long for him even through its darkness. 

Darkness that was never Belle’s _(I thought you were a man who would never let anything stand in his way_ ). This is more than just his curse, he thinks. This is something extra Regina added, like tweaked memories for a golden princess about a husband she’d never had. (It reminds him, too much, of Snow’s purity transformed to ruthlessness after all memories of love were taken away, but no, no, even without memories of him, his Belle wept at his death and smiled at his escape and reached for his hand, so eager and willing to help and heal and care.)

Regina has added evil to his sweet Belle, turned her heart artificially dark (and if he sees her now, _nothing_ will stop him from flaying the skin from her bones), and for all that the Dark One purrs inside him ( _then we can be together forever, nothing can keep us apart_ ), Rumplestiltskin is stricken with horror. He cannot kiss her (the last time he did, she screamed and pushed him away, payback for the time she kissed him and he did the same to her), cannot strip away his masks to reveal his true self to her (the last time he did, she smiled at him and walked away, straight into another man’s arms).

_You’ve been caring about the wrong people_ , Lacey says, and all Rumplestiltskin can see is Belle, standing there on that town line, so brave and patient and _strong_.

Belle standing on the deck of a pirate ship and insisting she saw good in him.

Belle coming back to him and cradling their cup as if it _mattered_.

Belle sitting on his table and smiling at him as she tried to get to know the man behind the beast.

She loved him. Even at his darkest, with deals and blood and lies between them, she still chose to love him. At his worst, at his best (although the two are hardly indistinguishable), she came back to him over and over again. She kissed him even when he was a monster, forgave him his darkest transgressions, ate hamburgers with him while evidence of his past indiscretions were paraded in front of her, and risked her life to lead him to his son.

Next to all that…how can he do any less? How can he possibly abandon her _now_ when she has always accepted _him_?

Bae doesn’t understand, can’t possibly know how much Rumplestiltskin owes even this faded shadow of Belle. And for all that Rumplestiltskin longs to tell him (to pull this man close and find in him the boy who loved stories and always, _almost_ always, saw the best in his papa), he can’t. He _can’t_.

Because talking to Bae again, even for a moment (even with the ghost of his warmth still tingling through his back), would mean ruining that one good, shining moment.

A bed, death rattling in his lungs, feebleness overtaking him so that this Neal can see the father he’s had nightmares about for centuries. _I’m still mad_ , he’d said, and Rumplestiltskin doesn’t begrudge him that (he himself carries grudges far older than that), but still he’d leaned in and held on. He wept tears for _him_ , for Rumplestiltskin the failure, the beggar, the coward (Belle’s the only other person who’s wept for him, and even she only knew Rumplestiltskin the Dark One, the deal-maker, the spinner, and yes, the coward, because that alone is what stays the same no matter the guise). 

No. Nothing is worth risking that perfect moment. If he were to go to him, to take three minutes Neal would count down to try to explain Belle (when he himself has never been able to understand her)…it would ruin everything. Bring back all the bitterness, the rage…the apathy.

Better open enmity than complete disinterest (his own father taught him that).

Besides, Rumplestiltskin thinks as he pulls diamonds from air and clasps them around Lacey’s slender throat, fair’s fair. All those times he left Belle, gave up Belle, lost Belle for Bae’s sake—now it’s Belle’s turn to be chosen, to be given priority. Isn’t it? 

(Or is that only his cowardice speaking again?)

(He’ll never know, because this is all he has ever been and all he will ever be.)

\---

Avoiding Baelfire. Courting Lacey. These comprise the whole of his life now. There’s nothing beyond this, no goal to work toward (Lacey will never truly love him because he isn’t unequivocally evil, just as Belle could never fully love him once her naïve visions of him as a truly good man enslaved by a curse were shattered), no plan to play out while centuries of his immortality are used up (he’s already found his boy, and his son’s given him up as thoroughly as his father did so long ago), and the years yawn frighteningly dark in front of him.

Worse, though, far worse is that his foresight has ended.

The asphalt road with the red scarf is behind him. The scroll left so carefully in his underground cell has been used. The sleeping curse has played itself out and the Savior has broken his curse and paid her favor, and all that awaits him now is his undoing.

His undoing. What does that even mean?

Death, he supposed so long ago. But with immortality looking less and less inviting ( _we can be together forever_ , Lacey tempted, but that meant nothing compared to Belle’s long ago _Then I will go with you. Forever._ ), that doesn’t necessarily seem something to fear.

_My life was such a burden_ , Zoso told him as his lifeblood warmed Rumplestiltskin’s fingers. And even then, so young and naïve and foolish, Rumplestiltskin had understood that sentiment, felt the pressure of continuing to breathe when the world threw every possible obstacle his way. Now, his naivete stripped away and darkness coating his soul, he’s made a habit of noting the desperate souls around him (just in case).

But words are important, the deal-maker knows, so perhaps _undoing_ doesn’t mean death at all. Perhaps it is the unmaking of the Dark One, the removal of his curse and his power and the constant price of magic. (But that seems increasingly unlikely as Lacey’s eyes grow colder, more malicious, and it seems ever more impossible to ever make her love him or to win Bae’s love back even by dint of sheer exhaustion).

So now, Rumplestiltskin conceives of a third, more terrifying option (the possibility that breaks a cold sweat over his body and drives away all chance of sleep).

To be completely undone—all his masks peeled away. The facades and the parts he plays. The power and the courage it imparts. The ease and the grace and the elegant words. The trappings of wealth and the accoutrements of ease and comfort. The cloak of success and the armor of magic, or reputation, of legend.

If it were all to be torn away, ripped from him until all that remains is the coward. The cripple. The failure. The man who ran. (The man who burned whole worlds for a chance he’s too cowardly to take now that it’s directly before him.) The pathetic, shivering mess that Hook sees and Regina suspects and the Charmings pity and Belle paints over and Bae never realized was there. The burden left behind by his mother and torn away by his father.

That…that truly is a fate worse than death. The most terrifying of prospects. It is the thought that lets him consider Lacey’s words ( _Get rid of them_ , she said, as if it would be easy, and it would. _Oh_ , it would). The possibility that leaves him shaking in a corner of his bedroom as little Bae stares accusingly from the shadows.

“You let me go,” he says.

“You can’t even look at me,” the teenage Bae mutters, so disappointed as the masks are peeled away one by one.

“Why would I _ever_ forgive you?” asks this Neal Cassidy from behind Lacey’s shoulder as she pours herself another drink and admires the reflection of her diamonds. “You’re everything I thought you weren’t.”

“Bae,” Rumplestiltskin tries to say, but nothing comes out.

“What was that?” Lacey arches an eyebrow, then smiles (where Belle’s smiles were flirtatious, hers are lascivious; where Belle’s were fond and knowing, Lacey’s are smug and gleeful). “Cat got your tongue?”

Behind her, Belle dusts his shelves, her blue skirts setting dust-motes to dancing in the light of her presence.

If he’s weak, if he falters for even a moment, Lacey will walk away without even once looking back. Belle will give up on him (surely even heroes can stop fighting if what they’re fighting for isn’t worthy in the least).

“I thought you were a man who would never let anything stand in his way,” Lacey says, and Rumplestiltskin is afraid that she wouldn’t recant even if she knew they were talking about a little boy.  
And why should she, really? Little boys can be just as dangerous as anything else. Rumplestiltskin learned that lesson when he was a little boy himself.

It’s self-defense, he realizes. Really, that all it is.

“A strong man fights for what’s his,” Belle says, his coat slung over her shoulders while Hook stands lurking in the background with a pistol in his hands.

Because that’s what happens when he leaves liabilities lying around, isn’t it? Maids are captured off the sides of the road after their heads are filled with damaging hopes. Miller’s daughters throw hearts away like garbage. Boys are lured from their safe homes with a pipe and sent back with desperate anger filling their minds until they’re ready to call on interfering blue stars. Guns are picked up and lines are crossed, memories stolen and personalities altered. A hook in his chest, poison in his veins, and his dagger in his enemy’s hands.

No, Rumplestiltskin knows better than to leave himself vulnerable. He knows, now, not to leave weapons unattended.

“Belle, help me,” he whispers as he crests a hilltop above a park.

“Bae, where are you?” he asks as he sees Henry alone, swinging with his eyes in the clouds and his future set to unmake Rumplestiltskin.

“I’m not this man,” he tells the specter of his True Love (her dress is blue, then he blinks it’s black, blue, black again, Belle and Lacey both at his side while damnation lurks ready to pounce). “Not anymore. You’ve helped me be a better man.”

“If you find something worth fighting for, you never give up,” she tells him gently, then mocks him with a laugh. “Don’t let anything stand in your way.”

“You left me,” Bae whispers, his head barely reaching Rumplestiltskin’s chin. “You wouldn’t leave me again, would you?”

“You won’t even try,” Neal sneers. “I should have known you weren’t worth my time.”

They’re both (all) looked at him. Encouraging or scorning, accusing or tempting, they all (both) choose to look at him. To turn their attention to him. They _care_.

But if he were to be stripped back to his basest part…they’d both despise him. They’d turn away.

They’d let _him_ go.

_Women can’t love cowards._

_Sons deserve better._

Rumplestiltskin twists his cane (his crutch, the one he wouldn’t need if he only had the courage to reach out and try again) and watches a rope fray.

\---

The rope doesn’t break. Instead, he does.

They come to him, this family he put together one piece at a time, strand of hair by conquered kingdom by child given up and found again. They send the savior ahead to her son (still alive, still free to bring about his doom in one way or another) and Rumplestiltskin can only think of escape. 

_How do you live with yourself?_ Snow asked him in the midst of her own self-loathing, and he gave her the only answer he has.

_You tell yourself you’re doing the right thing._

It’s self-defense, he thinks, but it’s a paltry lie that cannot endure the light of day.

“It’s about your son,” David says, and Rumplestiltskin is locked in place. 

They’ll know. This will be how his undoing starts. They will look at him and see the murder written over his face and realize just how evil he truly is. And from there, it will spiral on and out. They will scorn him. Hate him. But worst of all, they will _pity_ him, the beggar on the road with a son far, far too good for him. A coward who ruins everything he dares to touch. 

“What about him?” Rumplestiltskin asks (he doesn’t know, then, that this question will be the last he utters before his undoing; that his end has not just begun, but is already accomplished while he was playing with excuses and madness).

“Tamara shot him.”

(A gunshot on a dark road. A car and a line and fire in his hands, blood beneath his fingernails, Belle a warm, heavy weight atop him. Did the undoing begin _then_? Or was it even earlier, when a boy went to a Blue Fairy? Or earlier still, when a foolish, stupid boy took a bean and handed it over to his father?)

“What?” The word slips from him while the sky reels and the world evaporates. His balance deserts him, the only thing he’s had to hold onto for three-hundred years (the crutch he fashioned even before he picked up that hammer) gone without him even knowing.

(All the magic he’s accumulated, all the power he’s collected, all the skills and the knowledge and the favors and the debts and the crimes committed…all of it and he did _nothing_.)

“He’s dead?”

The swing rocks gently beneath a white sky. It’s Bae sitting on it now, so small, so vulnerable, so _doomed_ from the beginning. Small, but oh so brave. Beautiful and wise beyond his years. Forgiving and accepting and what did he ever do to have deserved such a life as was given him? His big eyes stare wide and trusting at his papa while the rope snaps, cord by cord, above his head.

“They used a bean to open a portal,” David’s saying, something so sad and compassionate (and _relieved_ , that his child is the one who held on while Rumplestiltskin’s is the one who let go). “Neal was hurt so badly that he fell through. He’s gone.”

A portal. A bean. A gunshot. A woman who was loved turned betrayer and killer.

The sets change, the costumes change, the players move positions, but the story is the same, round and round and round in never-ending cycles that all started oh so long ago when Rumplestiltskin dared to believe he could ever be worth someone choosing him over literally anything else.

Truth. Truth. That’s all that’s left to him is truth, the final death-cry over his undoing.

“Bae wasn’t supposed to die.”

All his foresight. All the visions and the endless possibilities, the potentials and the Sight he clung to…none of it ever hinted at _this_. If it had, if he’d had the merest sliver of a thought that _this_ would be the end result, he would have done it all differently. Would have waited another thousand years, manipulated a million more bloodlines, visited a hundred new worlds, made and remade himself over until the end result, no matter his undoing, was a Baelfire alive and well and safe and happy.

This is not the future he saw. Not the future he wants. 

So of course it is the one he has.

The Charmings are still talking, something about danger and failsafes and the end of the world (like it matters at all). “I need your help,” they say, like they always do. No matter how they revile him or look down on him or judge him, this is what it always ends in: a plea for help and yet more judgement.

“No,” he says.

“They killed your son in cold blood and you don’t want to stop them?” demands the shepherd prince, and if it were anyone else, Rumplestiltskin would have ripped his heart free and pulverized it. 

Instead, he steps back. Away. Stumbling, teetering, looking for a corner in a world too big and empty and frightening.

“They didn’t kill my son,” he says (truth bleeds from him). “I did. I brought magic to this world to find Bae, and now he’s dead. Magic always has a price, and this—this is it.”

“You’ll die!” the Charmings warn.

Rumplestiltskin would laugh if he could unfreeze his face. Would howl if he could unlock his heart. Would shatter into a million pieces if this were not his price to pay.

Die? A death to end his suffering?

It cannot come soon enough.

\---

He makes it to his shop. Lacey’s there. He should be dark. Frightening. In control. Ruthless and powerful and everything she wants him to be (everything he wants himself to be). 

He cries. Huge, wracking sobs that break him in half and rip his world into shreds and unleash enough tears to flood the oceans.

Lacey stands there and watches him. (Belle stands just behind her, but her back is turned to him; she knows about the rope, the easy justifications, the slippery slope he rolled headlong down.) She doesn’t come to him, doesn’t open her arms to him, doesn’t hold him (but she doesn’t leave either).

He’s alone. (No boy, no vision of a boy, no Sight of a boy, no one at all.)

Alone as every villain eventually ends up being.

\---

The world is ending. Rumplestiltskin doesn’t care. Let it all end in fire or in ice, in violence or in silence, he doesn’t care so long as it brings an end to his suffering (it doesn’t surprise him in the least that the price of his son’s life is the immolation of a world; Bae _was_ his world, entire unto himself, whole and perfect and _everything_ ). If he’s truly lucky (if he’s desperate enough to help it along), the end of this greatest curse will be enough to conquer the Dark Curse binding him to immortality.

The people are panicking. Rumplestiltskin delights in their screams (his own are mute; in some small way, hearing the others makes him feel as if they are all mourning Baelfire). A few break into his shop, some with lectures and traps disguised as gifts (the last time the Blue Fairy tried to ‘help’ him, it led to this moment).

Any moment, he expects Lacey to abandon him completely. This is his undoing, after all, and surely that means taking away everything, even the last hints of Belle. But she stays. Steps closer to him and tries not to look afraid (so young; he always forgets how young she is). For just an instant, he can almost fool himself into believing that there’s a familiar gleam in her eyes, a certain shine that was there in Belle’s just before she plucked the straw from his hand and touched her lips to his. He almost deludes himself into thinking that maybe, just maybe, if he were to try True Love’s Kiss again…it would work.

But this is his undoing. If Lacey’s still here, it means there are more ways for him to be destroyed.

Besides, even if he could bring her back (through a kiss or through the blue potion in his pocket), what would be the point? The world he created expressly for Bae is about to come apart at the seams now that Bae’s gone. The future is empty. His plans have all come to naught ( _your child will be fatherless_ , he was promised, and he circumvented it only to bring it to pass; _your child will die in the Ogre’s War_ , the Duke threatened, and Rumplestiltskin saved him from that fate only to deliver him to a worse one). And even if, by some miracle, this twisted version of Belle could actually love him enough to work one last bit of magic…why would he want to saddle Belle with the dry husk of _him_ that’s left without Bae (without even _hope_ of Bae)?

No. Better to let Belle’s last moment be there at the town line, when she was so jubilant and patient and in love. Better to remember the kind woman in the hospital who took his hand and offered to help him be the best version of himself. Better to let Lacey watch the world burn with liquor in her throat and power at her fingertips.

This is the last gift he has to give her: blissful ignorance.

And then. 

And then she touches the shawl. Bae’s shawl. 

Like it’s a rag. Like it’s worthless. Like Belle didn’t risk her life and find untold scores of bravery and shine like his own hero to get it back for him.

Like its handwoven threads didn’t warm Bae’s chilled toes and soak up his fretful tears and wrap around his shoulders after Milah’s abandonment.

Like it means nothing.

And suddenly it’s not enough that the only one grieving Bae is Rumplestiltskin. It’s not enough that there is no Belle here to usher this world on into the next.

It’s not enough and too much all at once that Rumplestiltskin is alone, crushed beneath this burden of loss (of guilt). He’s weak, he’s always known that. And selfish, more so all the time. And afraid, and that least of all is a surprise. But he doesn’t have to be alone.

It’s wrong, so wrong to wake her up to die, but he is shaking, crying, and he can’t be strong (he’s _never_ been strong, how could he start now?). The shards of their cup, a bit of magic paid for with just a splinter of his loss, and a potion the Blue Fairy more than owes him (he could try a kiss, but he’s already undone, he cannot risk another blow). 

Lacey looks at him, so clever and knowing, then she salutes him (he almost kisses her, then, if he could only just have scraped up a tad bit more faith…but it’s too late), and swallows down the potion.

\---

And then Belle. A blink of an eye and Regina’s invention vanishes, subsumed beneath the Belle of blue skirts and clear eyes and warm touch.

“Belle.” Her name is like hope and ash and copper on his tongue.

He’s alone for just an instant, and then, like magic without a price, she’s there, holding him, kissing him, weeping for Bae and (what he really wanted, secretly longed for, the reason he actually brought her back) absolving him of all his sins.

“You lost your son,” she murmurs even as she holds him closer. Holds him tighter. Caresses him softer. In her voice, the words are not an accusation, not condemnation, but rather empathy. Compassion. Understanding. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I failed,” he confesses. “I failed.”

Failure: he couldn’t apologize enough. Couldn’t make amends.

Failure: he didn’t investigate Tamara and make sure she was a Belle rather than a Milah or a Cora.

Failure: he let his son die thinking his papa didn’t care enough to try.

Failure: he let his son hang over another portal and fall without his papa catching him.

Failure, failure, failure. That’s all he’s ever been and all he can ever be.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Shh, Rumple, I’m so sorry.”

“Belle,” he whispers into her hair as he cries and shakes and hopes to die.

And as the world was born with the utterance of his son’s name, so it will vanish with the utterance of his True Love’s.

“Belle.”

\---

Except…the world _doesn’t_ end. The quakes pass, the ground steadies, and the future yawns, hungry and gaping empty, before him. Rumplestiltskin holds onto Belle for long enough to feel a few pieces of himself glued back together (a temporary measure, perhaps, but how can he tell Belle that once again, she isn’t enough for him, that he will never be complete without his son?). She stays close, but he knows her (knows _Belle_ in ways he refused, really, to know Lacey lest he fall completely) and he knows the curiosity that lives at the core of her.

So they venture forth into the world that shouldn’t exist.

Rumplestiltskin takes inordinate joy in the feel of Belle’s arms looped through his, not clinging like Lacey did but setting herself decidedly at his side, offering unspoken support. He delights in the smell of her coat and the warmth in her presence, and above all, in the light in her clear-seeing eyes, the goodness and the faith and the love all evident there in bright, bright blue.

He’s tempted to take her away (that’s what dragons do with maidens and treasure alike, hoard them somewhere dark and solitary where the world cannot touch them), to his home, to her library, to the cabin, anywhere where he can simply be alone with her, reassure himself he didn’t dream up all the best parts of her, isn’t imagining her back with him. (Anywhere where he can hold her close and pretend it’s possible for him to survive his undoing.) 

But Belle’s been locked away far too often, and if he wants to protect her, he has to know what he’s facing. So he contents himself with a kiss, this one free of the taste of tears (free of screams and pressure and expectations), and continues on toward the busy harbor.

He has to. If he stops, even for a second, he will shatter under the weight of Bae’s absence and even Belle won’t be able to sweep his splinters back together (even she will have to see his destruction as more than just a small chip).

\---

There’s a pirate ship at the docks. A crowd of people, all of them distraught and bereft (a mere fraction of what he feels). Belle’s hand tightens around his elbow, holding him together, as they catch enough of the conversation to deduce what happened.

There was a portal and a father jumped eagerly through with his son.

There was a portal and a son fell through while a father clutched a dagger tight.

There was a portal and a bullet and a father who fell through to save his son and the woman he loved.

There was a portal and soldiers sent out by a little boy to drag away another boy.

Now, there will be one more portal, a last green tornado to stand as gravestone over Rumplestiltskin (his beginning, his end, his crime and his failing and now maybe his redemption, or at least his penance).

He wishes, for just one selfish moment, that instead of coming to the harbor, he had taken Belle away. Far, far away where Neverland and shadows could never reach (impossible, though, if Peter Pan has pawns and paeons even here in the world without magic). But failing that, he can at least give her a gift far greater than the last one he tried (and failed) to give her.

A task to keep her safe (to keep her here, separated by worlds from Rumplestiltskin when he’s inevitably unmade back to a sobbing, burdensome Lost Boy), a kiss to tide him over (warm and burning with true love so much stronger than any potion), a last few words to build him up into the good man she’s fooled herself into thinking he is ( _Baelfire would be proud of you_ , such a kind lie to serve as Rumplestiltskin’s eulogy), and then he’s alone on a ship full of enemies.

There’s a portal (green and devouring and every bit as terrifying as the last two), and this time, a father leaps toward his redemption.

Toward his undoing.

Toward a final end.

Toward death.


End file.
